And thank’s to **Malthus **for bringing a bit of reason to this mess. Now I remember why *he *posts in these threads, and I don’t.
And if te terrorists on the boats were not in full support of the racist, baby-killing terrorists in Gaza there would have been no need of armed soldiers to board the boats.
See? We can go around in circles with the Blame Game all day.
I’m not sure I get the whole spices thing, either. I think my government screwed up there. I wouldn’t put some level of petty vindictiveness past certain government officials.
However, plenty of food and medicine is getting through on a regular basis.
What was the point of quoting me if you weren’t going to even attempt to answer the questions?
Obama needs to cancel his meeting with Netanyahu over this, at least until we know whether the prime minister ordered the killings.
Or maybe, JUST MAYBE, they thought the people in Gaza urgently need aid that Israel has an utterly random attitude towards blocking.
For the record, for years my view towards the Middle East was “fuck 'em, they’re as bad as each other”. It is only in recent years, with a growing disproportional response to everything, that Israel has made it very difficult for me to maintain this position.
I still think both sides have a large selection of evil bastards. It is just that one side has been bombed to fuck and is living in total poverty and the other receives an ungodly amount of cash and arms from the world’s only superpower.
I’m sure the Israelis will try hard to lose the next battle badly, and so regain your support. 
Or perhaps they are people that care enough about other humans that they desperately want aid to get through.
Bizarrely, some of the people in this thread have openly argued on this board about how evil the boarding of the SS Exodus and deporting the people on it back to Europe was, with one notable person comparing the British to the Nazis for doing it, yet are quite happy with the boarding of a ship carrying aid and killing several of the aid workers.
Nothing wrong with desperately caring about a cause enough to fight and die for it.
But if you fight, you don’t get to claim the same moral high ground as a non-combatant - you just don’t. Because "non-combatant’ means someone who is not a combatant.
Last I checked, these folks were not death camp survivors fleeing a Europe in ruins.
Again, the status of the dead as “aid workers” isn’t the significant issue: they could be composed entirely of Nobel Peace Prize winners, and it would make no difference. What is at issue is - were they fighting, or not?
Why? If Obama wants to find out what involvement Netanyahu had - or even if he just wants to ask Netanyahu to tread carefully and not fuck anything up - cancelling his meeting is the last thing he should be doing.
This was a stupid idea when people were saying we shouldn’t meet with the Iranians, and it’s a stupid idea now.
Netanyahu canceled the meeting.
My feelings are roughly the same. I’ve always supported Israel in the past. They’re a democracy with a decent domestic human rights record in a sea of despots. Yet their actions over the past few years, post the last savagery in Lebanon, have made it increasingly hard to summon any sort of sympathy toward them.
No, what is at issue is, were they there solely for a fight against an invading force of Israeli commandos, and the answer to that is obviously “No!”, otherwise they would have been better prepared.
It’s plain what you are, I just can’t say it on this forum and so withdrew it.
You’ve got not a shred of individual personal responsibility; my country right or wrong. This isn’t even about Israel is it, it’s your inability to distinguish between the abstract of statehood and the individual.
Very weird shit.
A pre-emptive strike across Obama’s bow?
My family in Haifa spent a month in a bomb shelter, and you’re talking about *Israeli *savagery?
Believe me, if *your *city had been bombed by a neighboring country, *your *government would have nuked that country into a parking lot. Don’t get all high and mighty with me; we know how blase you people can be when it’s not your own citizens being attacked.
Wow. Next you’ll be trying to convince me that they were in a warzone. They were on a ship that was (probably illegally) being boarded. Their actions were no different to those defending themselves again Somali pirates.
No, they are aid workers trying to get help to the residents of Gaza, a place in ruins and run like a concentration camp.
Again, they were defending themselves against being boarded. That boarding was quite possibly an illegal action similar to piracy. The Israeli forces boarded the ship. The Israeli forces were the agressors.
First of all, my country can be wrong, and has been worng on occasion. I just don’t think it’s wrong today.
Second of all, all Israelis are Israel. It’s what being a citizen means. We may not agree with each other all the time, but we’re still all in this together… or at least that’s the ideal.
Personally, I find the disconnect some peoiple here feel between their employees (their government) and themselves as kind of strange and disconcerting.
Mine did. I grew up in a small town outside Coventry, which got decimated in WW2. My Father grew up in Sheffield, where my Grandfather had a breakdown after pulling out his dead nextdoor neighbour from the remains of his house when the German bombed it. We eventually won the war and then got on with it. We’re friends with Germany now. If they’ve been firing glorified fireworks at us or we’ve been leveling their cities still then I must have missed it on the news.
No he’s not. He may be wrong (I’m not sure, not enough facts - hard facts - to go on yet), but Alessan is not a rabid extremist.