I don’t know who you think you’re talking to, but I was in discussion about a comparison with the Serbian Army, not the Nazis. But go on - there are surely tons of comparisons! I bet all three groups used guns too. And, even more tellingly, the vast majority of all three groups had noses. Yes, those Israelis are all nose-havers, just exactly like the Nazis!
Damn. Whooshed again.
Sure, that’s the point. It’s just an Association Fallacy
So I’m guessing this topic falls under the “witnessing” clause of the GD description and not the “debate” clause? I would be embarrassed by lifting feebly positive remarks out of people’s posts to agree and ignoring the actual point.
I don’t see any dead babies or toddlers or even pre-teens in these photo’s and so my assertion still stands.
Where’s the pictures???
Egypt and Israel aren’t much in disagreement about anything significant nowadays. And they have a common enemy.
Israel might not have an issue with it. But Egypt would. Again, Egypt is a dictatorship, and the biggest threat to the Egyptian ruling class is the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas is an uproot of it. The MB already has a large popular support, and having next to its border a state ruled by a successful, praiseworthy, Islamic party, supportive of its main internal opposition is probably the last thing Egypt wants.
Don’t you think the fact that there hasn’t been an opposing military inside the US since the invention of automatic weaponry might have something to do with this?
American children? No. But now Cuban children, that’s another thing altogether.
That’s bullshit and I agree with you–killing all males of child-fathering age and raping all females is in fact a genocidal strategy.
Bombing less than 1/20 of the land area of a population is not.
Missed the edit window: It’s not clear from my phrasing but I’m referring to the excuses made by the Serbians as bullshit, not newcomer’s statement.
The suggestions that the current barbaric conditions inflicted by the Israeli OFFENSIVE Army have no semblance to the brutality of the Nazis is sadly incorrect. In my opinion, this email tragically supports the correlation through photographic evidence. However, I’ll agree that we may have already seen most of these pictures but since the press were denied access in Gaza, no new pictures are available to account for the latest offensive. "“Israel has never restricted media access like this before, and it should be ashamed,” said Ethan Bronner, The New York Times bureau chief in Jerusalem. “It’s betraying the principles by which it CLAIMS to live.”
However, I think an excellent point has been made when suggesting we “take into account the context of the conflict”. When it was said - “they are not imprisoning Palestinians”, that poster is sadly misinformed. The relevant CONTEXT is the 3.8 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are surrounded by Israeli forces, Israel controls air, sea and land access effectively making Palestinians prisoners within Gaza, able to leave only with Israeli approval. Jan Egeland (a senior UN official) equated conditions to “living in a cage”.
You also mention the necessity of a fence to keep people out of “their country” - what country do you speak of? A recent study based on Israeli government records shows that more than 32% of the land Israel holds is PRIVATELY owned by Palestinians. This seizure of Palestinian property VIOLATES not only Israeli law but also a fundamental principle of a democracy: the protection of private property. If any people of this conflict are deserving of a fence, the evidence shows the Palestinians are entitled to protecting THEIR COUNTRY.
The correct “context” that should be spoken of is the peoples of Palestine have long been the victims of an organized brutality rooted in racist sentiments by the so called leaders of Israel. One may even say an intentional and systematic killing of large swathes of a segregated people - thankfully not 5 million people but if former IOF Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan who referred to Palestinians as “drugged roaches in a bottle” and also said that “a good Arab is a dead Arab” - was given his way, we may be speaking of a number large enough to satisfy your requirement for immediate concern. Sadly many more examples exist such as Menachem Bagin once saying “Palestinians are beasts walking on two legs”. Another former chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon referred to the Palestinian threat as like a “cancer” on which he was performing “chemotherapy”. This is the “CONTEXT” by which the Israeli OFFENSIVE Army launched this latest PRE-PLANNED war. Anyone given minimal information of current conditions in that area dishonor the victims of BOTH SIDES of this conflict to describe it as anything other than an offensive operation. It is an utter fallacy to suggest it to be a defensive response.
A short point of those “missiles” you speak of, I believe the preferred weapon of choice by Hamas has been rockets. As frightening as it must be for the citizens of Israel within the 25 mile range of these rockets, these weapons pale in comparison to the destruction (such as illegal incendiary devices,ammunition containing depleted uranium) as used by the might of the 4th LARGEST MILITARY in the world.
In response to the description of Hezbollah as “a group dedicated to the genocide of the Jews”. This sadly may be true. But another truth is atrocities such as those committed recently by the Israeli OFFENSIVE Army provide the very sustenance for these organizations to survive. The only accomplishment the IOA has done in this latest campaign is STRENGTHEN Hezbollah and other like groups and silenced any remaining voices of moderate sensibility.
I’m a little disturbed at the casual dismissal of the young boy arrested by the Israeli military. You frame the story line as a boy who deserves to be arrested because of a desperate act like “throwing rocks” as somehow justifiable in traumatizing this boy. What you don’t mention is this boy has probably has never known peace in his short life, bore witness to such horrors that you and I can only thankfully speculate, probably malnourished because of the lack of clean water and the blockades of food aid. This boy was not driven to throw rocks needlessly, one should be mindful of that.
The fact that 5 million people haven’t perished IS NOT a valid reason to dismiss the validity of this email. The intention of this email is to act as a warning to PREVENT another atrocity like the holocaust. If we refuse to take heed of the warning signs, we may find that history in fact will repeat itself.
It is the mission of moderate peaceful citizens on both sides to share truths and advance peaceful solutions for this horrendous conflict. We do a disservice to that movement by perpetuating tired old story lines that have bogged down the peace process. Let’s all be courageous enough to face these truths and work toward providing solutions.
Peace.
Ahmed
I’ll leave your other comments to others, but your claims here are suspect. First, the Israeli army is not the 4th largest in the world. Israel is ranked 17th by spending, and 32nd by the number of active troops. Even if you compare the entire Israeli military to only the active troops in other countries, they only come 8th.
Second, I would like to see a cite stating that Israel is using illegal incendiaries.
Is there anything that would not serve their purposes? Wouldn’t allowing them to bombard Israel with impunity do just as much to embolden them?
I call “wrong”. How about Jordan and Egypt? Why do THEY get a pass for their closed borders with the West Bank and Gaza respectively?
Face it, the treatment of the Palestinians by the Arab world has been just as shameful as their treatment by the Israelis. Palestinians have been denied the right to emigrate from the West Bank and Gaza BY OTHER ARAB STATES since the founding of Israel. A founding, I might add, which expressly included the right of Arabs to stay in their homes and on their lands, as evidenced by the many Arabs and their descendants who didn’t flee in manufactured-by-Islamic-leaders panic from an imagined Jewish genocide.
I am not saying Israel is right for using weapons that appear to me to be incendiaries on targets in civilian areas. I am not saying Hamas is right for spooging its worthless rocket/bomber/tunnel load all over the Negev instead of accepting both the reality of Israel and the fact that their own and their Arab coreligionists actions are the root cause of their current predicament.
Frankly we’d all be better off if World War I would have held off for another decade so the growing political unrest in the Judah/Palestine region at the time would have been properly focused on the Ottomans (who were, in my view of history, the main villains in this little play.) instead of externally on the British and Jews.
Apropos of nothing, I will now tell both sides how to resolve the Israel/Palestinian conflict in their favor.
Israel: Stop retaliating entirely with main military forces. I know you have the right to, but stop. Use special forces/intelligence agents to pinpoint and sabatoge rocket emplacements if you must. Also, open the borders to food and medicine and then pointedly call out Egypt for its failures in this regard. Then, and this is the hard part, keep doing this for a generation and a half until the kids and young adults are all saying “why do we hate Israel, when clearly this is a manufactured conflict by the old folks nursing grudges for history.”
Palestine: Stop with the rockets. Learn how to sing “We Shall Overcome” in Arabic. Watch much of the western world go apeshit berserk in your favor the first time a peaceful protester is shot by an Israeli soldier with poor training or a grudge. Repeat as necessary.
The “problem” with both of these solutions is that they require long-term planning and a willingness to out-wait the other. Neither side wants to do that.
That you can’t even call the IDF, the IDF, kinda sets the tone, eh?
What principle of Israeli democracy stated that they can allow for a situation which will see a repeat of all the fauxtography that went on in Lebanon? Freedom of the press within Israel does not equal freedom of the press in any warzone that Israel participates in.
This is simply a fabrication.
Egypt controls one of Gaza’s borders, and has indeed opened it and allowed Palestinians to travel in the past. Jordan controls one of the West Bank’s borders, and has indeed allowed Palestinians to travel in the past.
Israel.
What do I win?
Yet another fabrication.
A study recently found that a 32 percent of land in the West Bank was privately owned.
There exists no such principle. Google “eminent domain.”
Property rights do not exist in isolation from the sovereign’s administration.
There never was a country of Palestine. Ever.
And as you should be able to figure out, if 32% of the land the settlements are built on was privately owned, then 68% was never Palestinian land.
… has not actually happened and people who claim that Israeli is engaged in genocide are peddling a ridiculous fraud to push an agenda.
What is this, Fake Zionist Quote Theater?
Begin was not referring to Palestinans. You have in fact invented a quote, and that’s shameful. Begin was talking about Palestinian *terrorists who murder children. *
The actual, as opposed to your fictional quote, is:
Reported by the AP, June 9, 1982.
I’m not even going to touch the rest of your quotes without cites. You’ve used at least one I know for a fact is totally made up, and you can’t even call the IDF by its actual name.
Give cites or retract.
Bullshit. The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, Protocol III specifically excludes WP because it produces smoke.
:rolleyes:
You mean, I framed the situation by giving the actual context of the photo? How horrible of me. I don’t care an iota if you think the crime is “desperate” or not. Throwing rocks is a crime, especially with malicious intent. I care even less if someone who commits a violent crime is “traumatized” when they get caught.
In fact, using a rock means you’ve committed assault with a deadly weapon. “Traumatized” for not getting away with a potentially deadly assault?
Boo hoo.
Which is a pretty stupid purpose for the mail, since if Israel wanted to commit genocide, it could have done it long, long ago. As early as WWII, nations had the power to firebomb cities into rubble.
What, Israel is the Keystone Cops of genocide? They’re the Benny Hill of of massacres?
Mmm hmmm.
You should try it.
Let me see…a ghettoized existence under strong control and heavily regulated. Being treated in their homes and neighborhoods as second class citizens. Being subjected to a let me see your papers mentality. It would be dishonest to claim there are no comparisons.
You’re right Gonzo. I bet that the Nazis and Israelis also both breathed air.
Obviously it’s a valid comparison. You’ve convinced me. Israelis are Nazis.
(possible hijack)
They got some flakk recently over their use of White Phosphorous shells (which prompted a GD thread, search for “rules of war”).
Their military claims “these are smoke rounds, we use them to create smoke, that’s OK, we’re allowed to”, except the Palestinians claim the shells are deliberately fired in order to use the WP strips as incendiaries (what causes the smoke is a very exothermic reaction, that is nigh-impossible to quench and causes horrific burns) or as gas attacks (WP fumes are highly toxic).
Which, frankly, wouldn’t surprise me one bit - I’m not biased against Israel per se, but military minds are always crooked that way. And besides, there are other smoke-making devices out there, why insist on using the controversial one ?
(/possible hijack)
Kent State University, May 4, 1970. (Some of the students were armed with rocks.) Four students died that day. Some were on their way to class and weren’t involved in the protest.
As for the comparison of the war of Israel and the Palestinians and the Nazis against the Jews, there are at least one or two things that are very similar. The acts of violence originate with hatred that seems to find easy perpetuation. I don’t see that much difference in the hatred of the SS for the Jews, the Jews for the Palestinians, the Arabs for the Jews, the Muslim extremists for the West, conservative Americans for potential terrorists and other suspicious people, and on and on. Sometimes it is just hatred at different stages. The urge to kill them is the same no matter what the numbers are.