Well, they might have expected to deliver humanitarian aid supplies to Gaza. Just saying.
Mr Obama.
You are the facilitator of the Zionist regime. You are supporting killers.
It’s a bit like you are the drug dealer and Israel the drug user.
You are hooking up Israel with it’s next fix then sitting up late at night listening to it’s woes.
The American people are facilitators too.
You are supporting a clearly insane junkie. You are feeding it’s habit.
Time to wake up America.
of course
do you think I meant Tony Blair or Gordon Brown.
We’ve already discussed this. Please click on the links for the 4th GC where it talks about, among other things, economic advantage. There is arable land in Gaza.
The claim that Israel should not have responded to rocket fire with a military operation is hardly “obvious”, although it is a repeated claim. As for not allowing metal that can be used for rockets and the explicit 4th GC rules on internment, I’m not sure what your point is. And again you are voicing the same strange argument that ignores that Egypt can open Rafah any time it wants and let anybody cross its border that it wants.
If you can’t even claim a specific logical fallacy, largely because there isn’t one, I’m not sure what you intend me to do about it. I’ve pointed out to you, and Malthus has pointed out to you that the point is not that hardship is being inflicted, which has already been agreed to and while I’m not sure if Malthus has said anything specific, I’ve already said that the blockade should be loosened.
As pointed out numerous times, there are specific qualifications for making a blockade illegal though, if you weren’t addressing them then you were just citing “these things are bad”, which is a non sequitor.
Yes.
Meanwhile he’s been getting flack for months for allegedly giving Israel the cold shoulder. I guess that sums up this situation pretty well - and so does a lethal raid on an aid convoy. Both sides demand total support for their actions no matter how demonstrably inhumane they are.
Then, indeed, it wouldn’t implement Israeli policies (not importing washing machines or coriander). But even assuming that the USA (or whoever else) would be willing to take charge of some kind of partial embargo, do you think that the concept of a foreign country regulating this would fly in Israel? (or for that matter in Palestine/Gaza?)
In spite of Israel? Do you mean something like Obama stating “From now on, we’re taking Gaza’s issue in our own hands, and we don’t care what Israel think of it”? I don’t see that flying, either.
I object to the word “Palestinians” here. It seems to me that at the moment the Palestinian government appears to be more willing to compromise than Netanyaou’s government (although with this event, “compromise” will become a concept even harder to sell in Palestine, I guess, except if perceived there as just another drop in the bucket, contrarily to the current worldwide perception of it being a major event).
And as for the Hamas compromising, I don’t see this coming anytime soon. Not to compromise is their “raison d’etre”, after all. And they just marked big PR points yesterday.
Which is irrelevant if your audience does not read the language in which it is written.
Al Jazeera, Al Arabiyah, and several other Middle Eastern news outlets have English language editions. Stick to those if you want to make your point about news from a Mid-East perspective.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=7697021#post7697021
No. Links?
My comment applied to you as much as any other poster. This is a Warning to stop this manner of expressing yourself.
[ /Moderating ]
Yes, but its akin to the State Department issuing a travel advisory/warning to a known terrorist country, some Americans travel there anyway, get kidnapped and then beg for US intervention on their behalf.
The Israeli government flatly stated that they would use preventative action up to and including military force to stop this flotilla from attempting to circumvent its blockade…why is anyone surprised that they did exactly what they said they’d do?
If the USA was blockading a country and say, Sweden decided they were going to round up a humanitarian aid fleet and announced their intention to try to run through the blockade, and the US Navy told them that they would be engaged as military targets if they did so, and then proceeded to sink one of their ships, killing all aboard, would that be any different?
I don’t doubt Egyptians are overjoyed, but cheering Mubarak for that is a bit over the top. After all, he decided to blockade in the first place. I guess he just couldn’t support this policy any more. I count this as a major failure of his political stance rather than a decision worth of applause.
So about that chocolate, jam, fruit juice and coriander…
You don’t think they might want to use that arable land to grow food? You know, to eat? Seeing as you seem to think that an “adequate food supply” is one that doesn’t starve you to death…
Approximately 24 hours ago I posted this in this very thread:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12517719&postcount=135
At the time it seemed almost too simplistic. Almost immature. But on reflection, after reading what you have written, I now think it was very much on the money.
Regarding Rafah, I did mention that. Or at least I did in a post somewhere on this page. Israel puts pressure on Egypt not to open it. Israel makes demands. Israel and Egypt have gone to war over this region. Israel would probably go apeshit if Egypt opened it up fully, which if they have indeed just done could be worryingly interesting.
I’m not making a specific claim, because that’s for pedants and mentalists. If you can’t see that “person 1 claims A; person 2 claims A actually means B; person 2 demands cite for B” is a screwed up method of arguing then there really is no hope. Because, and here’s the big secret, I don’t agree that A means B. So why should I provides cites for B?
Well, as I have said, I don’t remember making any claims about it being illegal. I’m of the opinion that the blockade is mental and morally bankrupt.
Anyway, I’m lost here, are you saying that me writing about Israel limiting the supply of and destroying the infrastructure of water and electricity is a non sequitor or that the blocking of certain foodstuffs for no reason whatsoever is? Because the first I wrote about as someone, in my opinion, implied that Israel does not affect them and the second was, IIRC, in response to someone saying that the blockade was to stop weapons, which those foodstuffs clearly aren’t.
In your opinion or has Israel stated this? Because if they have there’s a Wikipedia entry that really needs updating.
Yes, because that would be sooo much better.
It’s not akin to that at all. Bringing supplies to starving people is, in fact, completely unlike going for a hike in a dangerous area.
That’s not what happened here - though for the record, I would be screaming about your hypothetical US Navy action, too.
Turkey said it would send boats. The IDF said they’d stop and inspect the boats. The inspection resulted in 30-odd casualties. The only question is whether the Israeli forces attacked the activists, or vice versa; I don’t know, and I’m not going to make up my mind on the basis of some grainy cellphone video and this Marmite guy screaming about “assassination lists”.
What I do know is that it is totally unreasonable for Israel to expect that the ships would sail to an Israeli port for inspection when everyone already knew they were carrying inexplicably embargoed building supplies.
This seems to be the justification for a lot of the crappy stuff Israel does.
Its only akin to that in the sense that they were warned beforehand of the consequences of their actions if they proceeded with their attempt to break the blockade and then they tried to do it anyway.
And why is it unreasonable for Israel to demand that ships dock in their port so that they can inspect the ships to be certain that what they are carrying is indeed humanitarian aid supplies and not weapons? Ashdod isn’t that far away.
I think I saw a Battlestar Galactica episode that revolved around an event like this.
Israel Foreign Ministry on Gaza Occupation
So no - and this is actually common knowledge - Israel does not see itself as the Occupying Power.
But they are in the eyes of the international community.
Its hard to commandeer a ship without setting foot on it.
I have said, several times, including at least once to you, that I believe that the blockade should be relaxed. And I have also pointed out that it also does not appear to be an illegal blockade and that the two issues should not be conflated.
Of course they would, that’s the point. Read the 4th GC where it talks about how an occupying power can have the right to deny consignments to an enemy if doing so would have a detrimental effect on the enemy’s economy and the enemy can be forced to devote its resources to producing those consignments rather than aiding the enemy forces.
And yet Egypt has opened it in the past and Israel has done nothing.
Egypt, in point of fact, has its own policies. Sometimes this is demonstrated quite graphically.
No, nobody implied that Israel does not effect them. Someone correctly stated that if the goal was starvation Israel could have already accomplished it.