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by slimmouse » Sun Aug 03, 2014 12:22 pm
by Nordic » Sun Aug 03, 2014 4:18 pm
by Nordic » Sun Aug 03, 2014 4:22 pm
by bluenoseclaret » Sun Aug 03, 2014 4:28 pm
World View: Hamas is stronger, the Jewish state looks shifty and heartless – and the world's eyes are on Gaza
As Gaza is devastated by a new paroxysm of violence, what has Israel achieved by its 26-day bombardment and ground intervention? The outcome so far is similar to that of past Israeli wars in Lebanon and Gaza: massive firepower is used to inflict heavy losses on the other side, the great majority of the casualties being civilians. But, as the war goes on, Israeli leaders find that Israel’s military superiority is failing to produce comparable political gains.
Worse, from the Israeli point of view, it is the Palestinians and, in this case, Hamas, who are in a stronger position than they were a month ago. By its actions, Israel has put the Palestinian issue firmly back on the international agenda from which it had largely disappeared since the Arab uprisings of 2011. Only a few months ago, a friend sympathetic to the Palestinians lamented to me that, in his travels in the US, Europe and the Arab world, he had seldom heard the words “Palestine” or “Palestinians”. Gaza, at horrendous cost to its people, has changed all that.
Usually, the sufferings of the four million Palestinians penned into Gaza and the West Bank are invisible to people in the rest of the world. But over the past month we have seen, night after night, pictures of Palestinian families, with their maimed and terrified children, vainly seeking safety amid shattered houses and hospitals. Israeli spokesmen sound shifty and heartless as they claim that there is no proof of Israel’s culpability for the shelling of a UN hospital or a children’s playground, suggesting that a Hamas rocket might have fallen short. These denials and evasions might work in a short war but, by the time 264 Palestinian children had been killed, as of Friday, they only serve to convince people that Israelis do not care how many Palestinians they kill.
Of course, we have been here many times before, the most notorious Israeli intervention being the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. I was in the Sabra and Shatila camps just after the massacre of 1,700 Palestinians by Christian militiamen who would not have been there but for Israeli actions. When I see pictures of the dead in Gaza, I feel I can still smell the sickly sweet stench of the dead bodies as they began to rot in the hot September sun. I remember the poverty of the dead, with their ragged clothes and plastic shoes, as they lay in the doorways of tiny shops or heaped up in alleyways. Out in the open, a donkey was lying dead between the shafts of a small cart carrying a barrel of water, and corpses were half-buried in a bank of sand, as if somebody had wanted to conceal them but had given up half-way through because there were too many bodies to bury.
Not everything is the same today in Gaza as it was in Lebanon in 1982 or in Gaza in 2008. A crucial difference is that, at those points, the countries neighbouring Israel were relatively stable, or at least had governments in firm control. Nothing could be less true this summer, as Syria and Iraq are convulsed by civil war, and Jordan and Lebanon look more and more unstable. Egypt has a leadership installed by a military coup and confirmed by a dubious election; the Libyan state has collapsed into anarchy, presided over by predatory militias. The Gaza war adds to the sense of general crisis.
A reason for Israel launching these mini-conflicts, for there has not been an all-out war since the invasion of Lebanon, is to demonstrate its raw military power. But, each time round, it simultaneously shows the limitations of that power to get anywhere in ending Israel’s long confrontation with the Palestinians. For all the devastating firepower of Israel’s air force, tanks and artillery deployed against a few thousand Hamas gunmen, it is unlikely to permanently eliminate them and thus win a military victory. And, even if it did, the victory would not be conclusive since the Palestinian sense of oppression is so great that some other armed group, possibly in the shape of Isis (the self-tagged Islamic State), would soon take its place.
When I was a correspondent in Jerusalem between 1995 and 1999, I came to believe that there was another reason, to do with the political psychology of Israelis, which explained why they fought these bloody but futile wars. This was put well by Uri Avnery, the Israeli writer and peace activist, who wrote that the Israeli army is filled with “teenagers who are indoctrinated from the age of three in the spirit of Jewish victimhood and superiority”. The same is true of much of the rest of Israeli society. Israelis genuinely feel they are the main victims deserving international sympathy, even when 1,400 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli shells and bombs compared with just three Israeli civilians and one Thai worker killed by Hamas’s rockets and mortars.
Every opponent of Israel, however puny, is treated by Israeli governments and much of the Israeli media as representing an existential threat. Any retaliatory violence is therefore justified, whether the targets are Palestinians, Lebanese or the 10 Turks killed on board the flotilla of boats trying to bring aid to Gaza in 2010. This sense of permanent persecution, born of pogroms and the Holocaust, is understandable but makes Israelis peculiarly vulnerable to demagogues manipulating their sense of threat. Israeli spokesmen have triumphantly pointed to polls showing that 90 per cent of Israelis currently support Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, but this lack of contrary opinion about a venture so unlikely to do Israel much good is, in reality, a sign of weakness in a nation.
Paradoxically, deliberate threat inflation by the Israeli government redounds to the advantage of Hamas. Its military wing fires rockets into Israel to cause fear among the general population by killing or wounding people; its attacks are largely ineffectual because Israel has the Iron Dome defensive system that intercepts the rockets. But Israeli leaders then do Hamas’s work for it by telling their people that Hamas is a threat to their very existence. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks of the “tunnels of terror” as if they undermined every home in Israel. A story spread on the internet claims that thousands of Hamas fighters dressed in Israeli army uniforms had been planning to surge through the tunnels into Israel in a sort of underground D-Day landing.
A great weakness of Israel is that Israelis believe so much of their own propaganda. Dr Arbuthnot, the 18th-century writer and satirist, said that “all political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies”. The same is true of nations when they see the world around them only through a lens distorted by the myths of their own propagandists. Israelis are diverted from the simple fact, proven so often since the war of 1967, that they are not going to enjoy permanent peace so long as they occupy the West Bank and besiege Gaza. The Israeli historian Tom Segev says: “It is not easy to understand why so many Israelis still believe that a large Israel without peace is better than a small Israel with peace.”
by American Dream » Sun Aug 03, 2014 4:33 pm
by Searcher08 » Sun Aug 03, 2014 5:00 pm
American Dream » Sun Aug 03, 2014 8:33 pm wrote:Posting a legit article does not mean that blue nose chump's time hasn't been long overdue...
by bluenoseclaret » Sun Aug 03, 2014 5:15 pm
The Times Of Israel has removed a provocatively-titled blog post after huge blowback, denunciations, and ridicule across social media. The post - "When Genocide Is Permissible" (in full below) - concludes, "Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clearly stated at the outset of this incursion that his objective is to restore a sustainable quiet for the citizens of Israel. We have already established that it is the responsibility of every government to ensure the safety and security of its people. If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?" Removal or not, we are sure this will do nothing to endear Israel to the world.
When Genocide Is Permissible (authored by Yochanan Gordon)
Judging by the numbers of casualties on both sides in this almost one-month old war one would be led to the conclusion that Israel has resorted to disproportionate means in fighting a far less- capable enemy. That is as far as what meets the eye. But, it’s now obvious that the US and the UN are completely out of touch with the nature of this foe and are therefore not qualified to dictate or enforce the rules of this war – because when it comes to terror there is much more than meets the eye.
I wasn’t aware of this, but it seems that the nature of warfare has undergone a major shift over the years. Where wars were usually waged to defeat the opposing side, today it seems – and judging by the number of foul calls it would indicate – that today’s wars are fought to a draw. I mean, whoever heard of a timeout in war? An NBA Basketball game allows six timeouts for each team during the course of a game, but last I checked this is a war! We are at war with an enemy whose charter calls for the annihilation of our people. Nothing, then, can be considered disproportionate when we are fighting for our very right to live.
The sad reality is that Israel gets it, but its hands are being tied by world leaders who over the past six years have insisted they are such good friends with the Jewish state, that they know more regarding its interests than even they do. But there’s going to have to come a time where Israel feels threatened enough where it has no other choice but to defy international warnings – because this is life or death.
Most of the reports coming from Gazan officials and leaders since the start of this operation have been either largely exaggerated or patently false. The truth is, it’s not their fault, falsehood and deceit is part of the very fabric of who they are and that will never change. Still however, despite their propensity to lie, when your enemy tells you that they are bent on your destruction you believe them. Similarly, when Khaled Meshal declares that no physical damage to Gaza will dampen their morale or weaken their resolve – they have to be believed. Our sage Gedalia the son of Achikam was given intelligence that Yishmael Ben Nesanyah was plotting to kill him. However, in his piety or rather naiveté Gedalia dismissed the report as a random act of gossip and paid no attention to it. To this day, the day following Rosh Hashana is commemorated as a fast day in the memory of Gedalia who was killed in cold blood on the second day of Rosh Hashana during the meal. They say the definition of insanity is repeating the same mistakes over and over. History is there to teach us lessons and the lesson here is that when your enemy swears to destroy you – you take him seriously.
Hamas has stated forthrightly that it idealizes death as much as Israel celebrates life. What other way then is there to deal with an enemy of this nature other than obliterate them completely?
News anchors such as those from CNN, BBC and Al-Jazeera have not missed an opportunity to point out the majority of innocent civilians who have lost their lives as a result of this war. But anyone who lives with rocket launchers installed or terror tunnels burrowed in or around the vicinity of their home cannot be considered an innocent civilian. If you’ll counter, that Hamas has been seen abusing civilians who have attempted to leave their homes in response to Israeli warnings to leave – well then, your beginning to come to terms with the nature of this enemy which should automatically cause the rules of standard warfare to be suspended.
Everyone agrees that Israel has the right to defend itself as well as the right to exercise that right. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has declared it, Obama and Kerry have clearly stated that no one could be expected to sit idle as thousands of rockets rain down on the heads of its citizens, placing them in clear and present danger. It seems then that the only point of contention is regarding the measure of punishment meted out in this situation.
I will conclude with a question for all the humanitarians out there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clearly stated at the outset of this incursion that his objective is to restore a sustainable quiet for the citizens of Israel. We have already established that it is the responsibility of every government to ensure the safety and security of its people. If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?..........
by DrEvil » Sun Aug 03, 2014 5:28 pm
A Letter From Doctor Mads Gilbert in Gaza
The email Mads Gilbert, professor of medicine at the University of North Norway (Tromso), sent to a friend on July 19 was a cri de coeur. He had spent two weeks in Gaza during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead attack in the winter of 2008-09, tending to the wounded and the dying in Al-Shifa hospital, and again for another week during a similar assault (Operation Pillar of Cloud) in 2012.
As then, Gilbert is now once again caring for streams of patients rushed into Al-Shifa (the name means “healing”) from the Gaza killing fields. I reproduce the email in its entirety because it is the first lengthy account by a physician writing directly from a hospital about the region’s injured and dying in the course of Israel’s latest hostilities. Al-Shifa has been under bombardment and shellfire; other health care facilities as well as ambulances and medical personnel have been attacked. Gaza’s only rehabilitation hospital, Al-Wafa, has been destroyed.
“Dearest friends,
“The last night was extreme. The "ground invasion" of Gaza resulted in scores and carloads with [the] maimed, torn apart, bleeding, shivering, dying - all sorts of injured Palestinians, all ages, all civilians, all innocent.
“The heroes in the ambulances and in all of Gaza’s hospitals are working 12-24hrs shifts, grey from fatigue and inhuman workloads (without payment [at] all in Shifa for the last four months); they care, triage, try to understand the incomprehensible chaos of bodies, sizes, limbs, walking, not walking, breathing, not breathing, bleeding, not bleeding humans. HUMANS! Now, once more treated like animals by ‘the most moral army in the world [sic].
“My respect for the wounded is endless, in their contained determination in the midst of pain, agony and shock; my admiration for the staff and volunteers is endless; my closeness to the Palestinian sumud [steadfastness] gives me strength, although in [some of the] glimpses I just want to scream, hold someone tight, cry, smell the skin and hair of the warm child, covered in blood, protect ourselves in an endless embrace - but we cannot afford that: nor can they.
“Ashy grey faces - oh NO! Not one more load of tens of maimed and bleeding: we still have lakes of blood on the floor in the ER, piles of dripping, blood-soaked bandages to clear out. The cleaners [are] everywhere, swiftly shoveling the blood and discarded tissues, hair, clothes, cannulas - the leftovers from death - all taken away... [only] to be prepared again, to be repeated all over. More than 100 cases came to Shifa [in the] last 24 hrs, enough for a large well trained hospital with everything, but here [there is] almost nothing: electricity, water, disposables, drugs, OR-tables, instruments, monitors - all rusted and as if taken from museums of yesterdays hospitals. But they do not complain, these heroes. They get on with it, like warriors, head on, enormous[ly] resolute.
“And as I write these words to you, alone, on a bed, my tears flow, the warm but useless tears of pain and grief, of anger and fear. This is not happening!
And then, just now, the orchestra of the Israeli war-machine starts its gruesome symphony again: salvos of artillery from the navy boats just down on the shores, the roaring F16, the sickening drones (Arabic ’Zennanis’, the hummers), and the cluttering Apaches. So much made and paid in and by US.
“Mr. Obama - do you have a heart?
“I invite you - spend one night - just one night - with us in Shifa. Disguised as a cleaner, maybe.
“I am convinced, 100%, it would change history. Nobody with a heart AND power could ever walk away from a night in Shifa without being determined to end the slaughter of the Palestinian people.
“But the heartless and merciless have done their calculations and planned another Dahiya onslaught on Gaza. The rivers of blood will keep running the coming night. I can hear they have tuned their instruments of death.
Please. Do what you can. ...This cannot continue.”
In an interview with Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman on July 14, Gilbert spoke of the Shifa staff’’s “resilience [...], determination and the way they cope with these extremely harsh conditions that they’re in now.” Gaza’s hospitals, he said, “are denied a constant supply of energy, of water, of disposables, medical drugs - all the items you need to run a university-level hospital. And on top of the total drainage of resources from the siege, they are now exposed to this constant and very large flow of the very severely injured. And they are not crippled. On the contrary . . . they have doubled or tripled their shifts. . . Everyone is extremely tired and exhausted, but they don’t yield.” Half of the 1,232 Gazans injured by July 14 were women and children: 36 children and 24 women had been killed out of a total of 170. “This tells you that these attacks are not targeting the militarists [but] the whole population, in order to intimidate them and to force them to give up their resistance . . . Israel is doing their utmost to kill them and to make their life as miserable as possible through these seven years of siege.”
Born in 1947, Gilbert is a member of the Norwegian Socialist Party, honored by his country for his contributions to emergency medicine. From the 1970s he has worked as a physician in both Palestine and Lebanon. In Norway, he was central in efforts that, in 2001, twinned Tromso with Gaza City. After 2009, in a report to the medical journal The Lancet, Gilbert wrote that the situation in Gaza was “a nightmarish havoc” and that he and Fosse had “witnessed the most horrific war injuries in men, women and children of all ages, in numbers almost too large to comprehend.”
An Israeli spokesman said Gilbert was “spreading vicious lies”, adding that he was “notorious for his radical far left opinions and his systematic demonization of Israel.” Gilbert rejoined: "This is a part of the propaganda war. We are not surprised and take this very calmly. We tell the truth and do not need to lie. If Israel think[s] we are lying, they can just open the borders and let the world’s press into Gaza. Then one will soon find out who is lying."
Five years ago, with his colleague Eric Fosse, professor of medicine at the University of Oslo, Gilbert wrote Eyes in Gaza, a series of journals about their two-weeks’ work in Al-Shifa in 2008-09. The book got no coverage in the mainstream US press. Not for lack of eloquence:
"Sunday was a terrible day.
"On Sunday, Israeli forces killed two young Palestinian boys who were playing on a roof.
"On Sunday, Israeli aircraft also bombed the vegetable market in the middle of the busiest shopping area of Gaza City.
"On Sunday, we received wave after wave of people frightened to death, some uninjured, some wounded, some dying and some dead - of all ages, with every kind of injury... They had one thing in common: they were all Palestinian civilians... Devastated human bodies were everywhere. On the floor, on stretchers, on tables, in the resuscitation room, behind curtains; and there were walking wounded with bleeding injuries.
"A dying pregnant woman. Children with recent amputations. The noise rose and fell . . . a numbing cascade of voices and cries, commands, outbursts, despairs and moans."
"The little nine month old girl I had been asked to attend to was just an early warning. She was pale and ill-looking after the anaesthetic and was almost unrousable . . . Parts of her tiny little left hand had had to be amputated after the nasty injury she had sustained in the family house. Nobody knew where her mother was, but her father and grandfather must have been killed." (Jumana, the nine-month girl, turned out to be a member of the Samouni family from Gaza City’s Al-Zaytoun district. Gilbert and Fosse soon discovered that Israeli soldiers had forced 70 members of her family into a building which was then bombed: at least 26 family members died, among them ten children and seven women.)
Another entry read:
"We could see that the splinter had gone on through the liver and into the duodenum, which had a three centimeter tear on the anterior surface. Dark blood was welling out through the tear in the bowel. It must be coming from a major vein. I freed the duodenum and was able to see a tear in the inferior vena cava, which brings all the blood from the lower part of the body back to the heart. We packed a lot of compresses in against the vein and managed to stop the bleeding for the time being . . ."
Gilbert returned to Gaza in November 2012, working again at Al-Shifa. A power point he compiled with Sobhi Skaik, head of Shifa’s surgery department, has photographs, graphs, and narrative about the hospital’s work during that week of atrocities. One graph charts the daily death toll, showing an increase in mayhem over the course of the week - from nine deaths a day at the start of the assault, on November 14, to 45 by November 21. Then, as in 2009 and now, well over a third of the victims were women and children. The power point includes a reference to Israel’s Dahiya doctrine. This unabashedly propounds a war crime: deliberately targeting civilian infrastructures as a means of inducing suffering in civilians — for “deterrence.” (Israel has not been denounced for carrying out this “doctrine”.)
This June, Gilbert wrote a 17-page report to UNWRA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency), titled “The Gaza Health Sector as of June, 2014”, which shows that the situation in Gaza was catastrophic even before Israel’s current onslaught. He wrote: “Palestinian childrenin Gaza are suffering immensely. A large proportion are affected by the man-made malnourishment regime caused by the Israeli imposed blockage [imposed by Israel in 2007]. Prevalence of anaemia in children of [under] two years in Gaza is at 72.8%, while prevalence of wasting, stunting, underweight have been documented at 34.3%, 31.4%, 31.45% respectively.” This is just one passage in a 17-page document that presents evidence of the excruciating results of Israel’s intent, when it imposed its closure of Gaza eight years ago, to “put Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” (The quote in full is by Dov Weisglass, advisor to then prime minister Ehud Olmert who imposed the blockade in 2007.)
From what I have seen from Al-Jazeera stories and Internet reporting, and from reports Gazans have managed to get to the world through social media, I believe the scenes Gilbert and Fosse described in Eyes on Gaza are interchangeable with the ones now unfolding.
There is no doubt that Mads Gilbert will again be attacked for speaking out against Israel, backed unstintingly by the US since 1967, and before. In a world in which the world’s superpower remains willfully blind to Israel’s crimes, while France’s prime minister François Hollande forbids demonstrations on Gaza’s behalf, Mads Gilbert’s voice needs to be heard, as he bears witness to the agony of Gaza’s stricken population.
by bluenoseclaret » Sun Aug 03, 2014 6:17 pm
After authoring an op-ed on the Times of Israel website advocating for genocide against people living in the Gaza Strip as a method to achieving “quiet,” writer Yochanon Gordon has issued an apology.
“Anyone who lives with rocket launchers installed or terror tunnels burrowed in or around the vicinity of their home cannot be considered an innocent civilian,” he wrote Friday morning in a piece that was quickly yanked off the paper’s website.
Following outrage over his comments, and a rebuking from the Times and other sites that carried his piece, Gordon remained steadfast in his belief, telling critics his stance is a “moral and responsible” one.
But his tune seems to have changed, as he issued an apology on the Five Towns Jewish Times website.
His full note below:
I never intended to call to harm any people although my words may have conveyed that message.
I wish to express deep regret and beg forgiveness for an article I authored which was posted on 5TJT.com, Times of Israel and was tweeted and shared the world over.
I never intended to call to harm any people although my words may have conveyed that message.
With that said I pray and hope for a quick peaceful end to the hostilities and that all people learn to coexist with each other in creating a better world for us all.
Alex Kantrowitz
Guy who argued for genocide in @TimesofIsrael now doubling down on his position via Twitter. https://twitter.com/ygordon5t/status/495242754671124480 …
by American Dream » Sun Aug 03, 2014 6:25 pm
by bluenoseclaret » Sun Aug 03, 2014 6:40 pm
by Searcher08 » Sun Aug 03, 2014 7:00 pm
American Dream » Sun Aug 03, 2014 10:25 pm wrote:There will always be racist/fascist types- and they will always try to repackage themselves in new and inventive ways. And there will always be those to run interference for and otherwise defend such scummy individuals.
Generally, there's not as much difference between the two types as they might have you think...
by Alaya » Sun Aug 03, 2014 7:36 pm
by Sounder » Sun Aug 03, 2014 9:06 pm
by Luther Blissett » Sun Aug 03, 2014 9:09 pm
Nordic » Sun Aug 03, 2014 3:22 pm wrote:Page 4 is nothing but bickering. What a waste of time.
This is one of the reasons I quit coming here.
Sure ive been known to be guilty of it too but just yesterday I put the people who piss me off on ignore.
I recommend that.
We can't even have a thread about obvious war crimes, ongoing and heinous, without bickering. That's fucked up.
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