http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/08/19/jerusalem.bombing/index.html
The bus was filled with kids coming back from the wailing wall.
What the fuck do you do if you’re Israel?
You call all your family and friends in Jerusalem to make sure they’re OK.
Then you just keep on breathing one breath at a time.
I would certainly have to restrain myself from wanting to grind someone to dust with a tank.
Be safe Alessan.
You ain’t got no f***ing idea what it’s like. Think (somewhat smaller scale) 9/11-s every other month.
Not to belittle 9/11 - it WAS a unique event even in our terror-saturated world - but 3000 killed out of a population of 300 Million is like 60 out of a population of 6 Million.
So while every individual who loses his or her life is a full microcosm of his/her own, each a unique loss, when you ultimately get down to the numbers game that you must play in the end, then to us over 1000 dead Israelis in the past 3 years is like repeating 9/11 OVER and OVER again - some 20 times during this period.
May the dead rest in peace. May their families and friends know no more sorrow. May the wounded recover fully.
Dan Abarbanel
[sarcasm]
Why ask only what you do if you’re Israel? After all, it’s clear that there is no moral difference between the two sides. I mean, it was just yesterday that 20 Palestinian children were randomly slaughtered by the Israeli army for no particular reason, right?
[/sarcasm]
Amen.
Absolutely horrific. They showed the uncut footage on UK’s SKY News just after it had been received. Fucking nightmare. Disgusting.
(Max, can we leave the politics out of it, just this once?)
Cite?
Why? I fail to understand why some people need to pretend that there is some sort of parity of violence going on. Why do some people in a wrongheaded desire to be “neutral” act as if this were some mysterious natural disaster, instead of being an act of human will? Some person deliberately detonated a bomb on a bus, fully cognizant that he was killing children and adults alike. This was not an isolated instance of one disgruntled man committing a freak act of grotesque carnage, but merely one instance of many in a deliberately orchestrated political campaign of terror.
The sad thing is that one dare not condemn Hamas or the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade for these murders because a chorus of self-righteous Dopers will defend the members of these organizations against “unfair generalizations.”
My heart goes out to the families, but also for the peace process.
Well sign me up to be the first to condemn those animals.
Any advice on how Israel should handle this?
I agree with you on the personal level - the terrorist has taken the obscene decision to maim and kill and destroy the lives of innocent men, women, and children. But I don’t agree with you about terrorism: if a people are shat on for long enough, terrorism is bound to arise, and the extremists within that community - and believe me they will rear their ugly heads in every community (with the possible exception of the Tibetans) - will feel justified in committing acts of wanton slaughter.
In this way, terrorism is in fact a “natural” phenomenon, in as much as it is a mechanism of society. (By the way, I’m not saying this is the cause of all terrorism - Unabombers, McVeighs, Al Qaedas, Red Brigades, Baader Meinhof). Clearly it isn’t perfectly delineated, and I’m sure that Al Qaeda applaud yesterday’s murders, but Islamism isn’t the cause of Palestinian terror in the first place; the cause is the denial of basic rights to a people. Just like Republican terror in Northern Ireland.
Way to misrepresent a viewpoint. Care to cite this? These people are scum.
I think in this case it’s the inmates running the asylum. If I was a Palestinian I would want the terrorists to fuck off, that way I could get a job, food, lifting of curfew, etc.
Of course if you said that, you would get dragged through the streets.
I concur. There was a similar problem in Northern Ireland. Cross-community peace groups (such as the “Peace People”, set up by Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976) were often threatened, and IIRC, peace activists were even attacked. In the end, it comes down to political initiatives and willing on both sides.
In that case, I wonder if Israel should really go after Hamas, et. all. Althought the ensuing bloodbath might not be worth it.
What a shitty situation.
I know a British-Israeli whose currently out in the West Bank with the ISM at the moment he said there is a sizeable feeling of antipathy to Hamas:
I never said Islamism was the cause of Palestinian terror, and I agree to a point that anger simmering for decades is one of the underlying causes of this mess–but that’s immaterial to the matter at hand. No nation, no amount of revenge, is worth killing Israeli and Palestinian kids. None.
Oh, please, I just got pitted by a pack of Dopers angered at what they saw as my “unfair generalizations.” I guarantee if I said one word against Hamas, they’d be on me like a duck on a Junebug, all "How DARE you vilify the good folks of Hamas… . " and "don’t you know that each act of terrorism is completely individual with absolutely no planning or overarching strategy, so stop using so wide a brush. . " and "anyway it isn’t terrorism, but perfectly justified resistance against the Israeli occupation, you bigot. . ."and so forth.
Besides, even though I am very clear that I am only discussing the terrorist organizations, self-righteous Dopers will accuse me of vilifying all Palestinians and Islam at large, even though I said no such thing. I’ve come to the conclusion that nothing I say is going to be read without a negative spin put on it.
In my fantasy world, the Israelis and Palestinians would agree to a division of territory, establish diplomatic relations in an atmosphere of mutual respect, and end this cycle of violence and retaliation once and for all.
Chorus? Two or three loons, maybe. But I doubt you could find even a half-dozen folks on the SDMB that would defend those organizations as being anything but a threat to peace.
'course you will get annoying pedants like me that will chime in with corrective/informative factoids about the organization, appeal, or ideology of such groups when the topic comes up. But that’s hardly the same as defending their agenda of violence IMO.
Then again, I am in the “understand them, to better neutralize them” camp, which I know not everybody agrees with as a matter of strategy.
- Tamerlane
That may be, however…
I seriously doubt you’d get much of this sort of guff. I might be wrong, I suppose - it happens occasionally ;).
That, I’ll grant you, is more possible depending how your phrasing came out and how knee-jerk posters were feeling at the moment. There is a certain reflexive tendency by some to start reading superficially similar, but actually more nuanced arguments as identical and responding to them as if they were the same. I’m probably guilty of this occasionally.
But it seems to me that such misunderstandings should be easy enough to clear up. Most of the time, anyway.
- Tamerlane
It depends. Understanding the psychology of terrorists to forestall their acts and to neutralize their influence in the communities is a laudable goal. My problem is when posters say, “You can’t condemn terrorism because you have to understand the terrorists’ POV.” "