by AlicetheCurious » Sun Jul 16, 2006 11:26 am
<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>The situation here and now is that Israel exists and considers itself a state responsible for (at least on paper) the well being of its citizens. When some of those citizens in the institution that "defends" them all get kidnapped, not killed in combat but pinched as hostages, it goes off and responds out of all proportion.<br><br>Its like the coppers. What happens when someone kills a cop, or even bashes the crap out of one? They all go psycho, and not just on that individual. They have to again maintain the position of semi safety that their violence and ability to inflict it, provide.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><br>Wow, that's scary, Joe. You have no idea how brainwashed you are, and it's creeping me out. Don't you know yet that whether "millions of Arabs still hate Israel" or love Israel dearly, is totally irrelevant, unless Israel is forced to comply with international law? Israel is not "reacting", let alone "overreacting", it is growing and killing everything in its path.<br><br>Israel, by far the most militarily powerful state in the Middle East, is a racist, expansionist state. Shut out the propaganda, Joe, and look at the facts on the ground.<br><br>Israel is unrelentingly consistent; during times of war, it has always deliberately massacred and terrorized civilians and targetted civilian infrastructure as the prelude to expanding its territory. Then it steals precious water and other resources, herds the devastated survivors into camps, and then builds heavily guarded settlements for Jews-only, who then become the "citizens" whose "fingernail" is worth a thousand Arab lives. <br><br>This is not a "cop" -- this is a murderous, thieving, heavily-armed, criminal gang. The "cops" are those corpses in suits over at the UN.<br><br>"Peace" in Israel means time to grab more land and build 'facts on the ground' while celebrating Israel's courage in making concessions (none of which are irreversible, as we have seen time and time again). It means a chance to infiltrate and fatally undermine its neighbours' economies through the back-door of US "aid" and either open or disguised Israeli investment. Best of all, during "peace" time, Israel has the choice of oppressing the people directly, or demanding that they 'police themselves', ie, arrest, imprison, torture and kill their own people so Israel doesn't have to.<br><br>And those "citizens" you mentioned as being "pinched as hostages" are soldiers of the illegal occupation. They were captured as prisoners of war, for the express purpose of exchanging them for the more than 10,000 people who HAVE been kidnapped, many of whom are children, almost all of whom are civilians, who in many cases were not even charged with anything, or given even a pretence of a trial.<br><br>Those soldiers are lucky -- if they'd been Arab, the 'civilized' Israelis would have just killed them while they were sleeping in their beds, probably along with their families and anybody else who happened nearby.<br><br>The state of Israel is completely psycho -- psycho like a fox. Psycho like the Nazis were. Psycho like the European settlers who decimated entire nations to found the New World. <br><br>And you Joe, are a racist. At least have the integrity to admit that you don't give a shit about what Israel does to Palestinian people. Let's all try to understand how Israelis FEEL.<br><br>If the Israelis are driven 'psycho' by the actions of Palestinians, then how 'psycho' should the Palestinians be after 60+ years of unbearable suffering? How 'psycho' should they be as their cries for justice are met with more massacres, surrounded by silence or empty promises?<br><br>Most of the news is reported from behind the Israeli tanks or from some Israeli hotel, and much of it is simply press releases from the Israeli occupation army. So I don't totally blame you, unless you wilfully limit yourself to those sources. There is some excellent journalism, by reporters who are risking their lives to go see and report the reality on the ground.<br><br>Also, there are still a few Westerners brave enough to risk staying among the Palestinians. Here is a letter written by one of them, just one little voice actually reporting from behind the wall, what PALESTINIANS 'feel':<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Excerpts from <br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://peacepalestine.blogspot.com/">Letter from Palestine</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br>Israel has over 10,000 Palestinian hostages, hundreds of them children, and slaughters Palestinians of any age on a daily basis. When Palestinians take 2 Israeli hostages and kill two soldiers, Israeli bombs Gaza. Bombs out the power stations, the water reticulation; no electricity, no water, bridges blasted severing cities from each other. <br><br>Gaza Strip, the most densely populated area on earth on account of Israel using it as a specially designed human garbage can where refugees are disposed off and hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world.. Brilliant, but unsuccessful. If you treat humans as garbage and they know that they are humans and not garbage, they will not quietly disappear. You will never sleep safe at night. You will never have the right to sleep safe at night. May you never sleep safe at night.<br><br>...<br><br>A young woman in my neighborhood asked, can you believe Israel kidnapped most of our government last night? Imagine waking up to hear that Palestinian forces had kidnapped 90 Israeli government leaders. It's hard to imagine that Israel would leave one house standing, one person uninjured.<br><br>Imagine if Palestinians had the military capacity to punish Israel on a comparable scale for every 2 hostages it takes and 2 it kills. Imagine if Americans, and Europeans, valued the blood of Palestinians and Iraqis as much as their own blood. Imagine if the nations of the world used their armies to protect the lives of the innocent and bring to justice thieving, raping, murdering states. <br><br>...<br><br>Today I visited with another friend who thinks he may be captured tonight; so many of his friends were captured last night. He said, Israel doesn't care too much about the lives of the Israeli hostages, in the past there were cases of them killing the hostages themselves by indiscriminate bombing of communities. But Israel has been waiting since Hamas' election for Hamas' first military operation, and so they knew this massive attack on the community would come, sooner or later. Even though different groups have participated in the Palestinian military operations in the past few days, all of Israel's targets are Hamas leaders. <br><br>Israel wants to see Hamas destroyed, Europe and America want to see Hamas destroyed, and Abu Mazen seems to be trying his best to join them. Many of those arrested were among the Hamas members that Israel exiled to the no mans land between Israel and Lebanon, a decade ago. He told me some of his friend's stories from those three terrible years, living in tents through snowy winters. He talked about the warm spirit that thrived in the tents during freezing months. He told of how hungry men went to an apricot orchard and couldn't find the owner, so they took some fruit and then tied some money in a handkerchief to the tree. When the owner found it, he tracked them down, and said to them, with tears coming down his face, what kind of men are you, starving and rejected by the world, who have such principles that you will not even take fruit that you find on a tree. I give you my fruit, I give you my orchards! <br><br>I felt the poverty of being from the West, where the media can say nothing about these men except to endlessly regurgitate simpleminded slander... of those captured I know just a few names, and little of their stories. For anyone here, each of these names represents a rich story, decades of struggles, of suffering, heroisim, years of prison, of pain, of courage, of trying again, of hopes betrayed, of disappointment and endurance that continues forward to find new hope. <br><br>...<br><br>"There is no dignity in Palestine; we face humiliation at checkpoints, restriction from visiting our families or going to school, soldiers in our homes during the night, prison... Israel's war is first of all against our dignity which Israel attacks from every angle and with every means possible, because if it can succeed in destroying our dignity, we will not be able to resist anymore." <br><br>"There is tremendous dignity in Palestine; perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, because the occupation with all its mechanisms for humiliation makes us aware of our dignity; the more they try to destroy our dignity the stronger our dignity becomes; they are getting the opposite results that they want. <br><br>There are two kinds of dignity: one that you get from others, when you are treated with dignity, the other comes from inside of you, from what you know about who you really are before God, and no one has the power to take this away from you unless you let them. Even if as women we are captured by Israel, stripped naked and raped in the prisons, if we resist every attack upon our dignity it will not be lost. <br><br>A woman was told at a checkpoint to remove her scarf. She refused, and the soldier showed her a metal rod and said he would drive it through her eyes if she did not take it off. You can have your eyes, or you can have your dignity. She refused. He drove it through her eyes. She survived, but she is blind. And she did not lose her dignity. A friend of the Prophet Mohammad, a woman, was tied to the ground by a man who made her choose between her dignity or her life. The only thing she was able to do was to spit in his face, and she did. He killed her. But he did not destroy her dignity."<br><br>"Arab people have a great source of dignity from the rich and deep history of our culture. But now all Arab lands are captive and only in Iraq and Palestine are we free within ourselves, because we do not accept the enslavement that is forced upon us; our resistance gives us great dignity."<br><br>"...We get our dignity from our land. It is our life. As long as we are in our land, no matter how much we suffer, we will have our dignity. If they succeed in expelling us to Jordan, our dignity will be lost forever. I have my family's olive trees. Every year I used to have precious olive oil from my own trees that I could give generously to my friends and neighbors. Now Israel has killed half of my trees and imprisoned the rest. These trees are like my own children. It is a terrible, terrible sorrow and shame for me each day to know that I am powerless to help them."<br><br>...<br><br>The Americans, Europeans and Israelis place more value on the blood of their dogs and cats than they do on the blood of Palestinians. None of us can ever forget the sight of little Huda screaming for her father on the beach of Gaza, throwing herself on the sand next to his dead body over and over. No one in the world has expressed their outrage, or even sorrow, to us about these atrocities against us. ..Our blood is so, so cheap to the world, and Israeli blood is so valuable. They do not see our humanity at all."<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br> <p></p><i></i>
