Can we please have this debate without the need to fact-check every statement?
Because that’d be nice.
Fiction.
And you claim was not that most of it was “involved”, but that it was “flattened”.
Again, I can’t make you write things that are true and not use fictions to try to sell your narrative, but it’s kind of silly to rely on fiction to prop up your rhetoric and then complain when the facts are pointed out.
This is the exact problem I’m talking about. When faced with the facts, you have immediately posted something that is fiction and then, incomprehensibly, provided a cite showing that your claim is fictional while pretending that it proves your claim. To say nothing of the fact that your wikipedia map has dubious grounding, at best, even while it debunks your claim. Someone draws a map, that map debunks your claim, and you still provide it as support.
The map of Israeli airstrikes earlier posted clearly shows that this is false. Please try to salvage some credibility and admit that you were badly mistaken.
Why would the peace protesters need arms at all, if they were in fact, peaceful protesters interested only in delivering what they perceive as needed humanitarian goods to Gaza?
I mean, this wasn’t a surprise excursion to avoid the blockade. It was announced awhile ago, and Israel repeatedly stated that they would stop any attempt to circumvent the blockade, and these protesters (or whomever they were, as I am not firmly convinced that their intent wasn’t incitement rather than true altruism) just went ahead and tried it anyway.
And then Israel stopped them. Just like they said they would back when they warned this movement not to go forward with their intentions.
This is debatable. It seems to me more likely that the point of the ‘inspection’ was to stop the ships from reaching Gaza. Is there any credible evidence that they would have let the ships through under any circumstances, or are you just assuming that?
They would never have been allowed on board, even by extremely peaceful protesters.
I expected the ships to be intercepted by Israeli military, and using naval commandos for this makes perfect sense. That’s the kind of situation they’re trained for (amongst others, of course, but naval commandos aren’t used solely for war operations) and are they’re the most likely (in theory) to conduct such an operation successfully and without bloodshed.
I believe too that enforcing the embargo required these vessels to be intercepted (even moreso than a random ship, given that it was a largely covered PR operation).
Whether or not the embargo itself is acceptable (especially since it’s so extensive) is another matter entirely.
Seconded.
(Although I’m a bit surprised that he’s finding weird that citizens would distance themselves from their government “employees”. Plenty of people don’t identify themselves with their government, and doing so generally has bad results : “my country right or wrong”, as someone said)
ETA : was this ship boarded after the other ones had been? (making people onboard more likely to “prepare a defense”). I wasn’t aware of the story before I opened this thread.
Arms? You mean: Shit-they-put-together-from-what-was-available-on-board. If I was under the impression that a bunch of soldiers had come onto my ship and started shooting, I might pick up whatever was lying around as well. For instance, things that might be on a passenger ship: crowbar, metal pole, knife, alcohol (Raki probably burns pretty well), bottles, or toys I was bringing in for a Palestinian kid. If I was below deck, I might even get everyone around me to search and put these things together to make one last ditch effort to protect my people from the invaders.
In other words, perfectly reasonable weapons available, which were not stored on board as part of some super-secret-make-Israel-look-bad-strategy.
The truth. A portion of Lebanon was involved in the fighting and even then the damage was comparatively limited in most locations. Not that your pretty map with big drawings, that still debunks your claims, is a slam dunk or anything.
The actual fighting went on (rather obviously) where Hezbollah forces fought Israeli ground troops. Your drawn-map doesn’t contradict that and, even then, only claims that there were highly limited incidents in the north. What verification you have for your wikipedia map is currently unclear. Why you’re citing the Samidoun Media Team as objective fact is even less clear. Especially since they refer to Israel proper as “occupied Palestine”.
That’s generally a clue.
There were military targets hit in the north that we know about. But the north as a region was not touched by the fighting, which was indeed limited to the south. Operation Litani never progressed to the north.
My problem is with “appears”. It doesn’t “appear” like your proposal at all. I just have this nagging doubt that their approach was to pull knives to get killed. You seem to think that it “appears” that way.
This article from cnn Israeli military gives version of flotilla incident - CNN.com presents the Israeli side of the matter. If you’re willing to give equal consideration to a view opposing your own, it sure sounds like to me that they were laying in wait for the Israeli attack, at least to some degree.
Again, this wasn’t some surprise. The protestors said they were coming. Israel said don’t or else. The protestors came anyway (surely they weren’t so blase to ignore Israel’s warning…right?). Israel’s “or else” happened. PR fury ensues.
What “the linked account”? We’ve had an account linked by someone who was actually there. That seems pretty linked. Yishai is also an award winning journalist with quite a solid reputation, if you’re alleging he made the whole thing up, that’s a pretty serious charge.
Ah, old faithful, the ad hominem. Can you point to a single claim made by the map that is incorrect? No? Thought not.
You could have saved yourself a lot of time posting that and just admitted you were wrong when you claimed fighting was limited to a portion of the country. Even the most northerly towns in Lebanon were bombed multiple times.
Sure, I would like to know the sequence of events. I would like to know if what appeared to you to be the case is actually true. It would affect my point of view to some extent. At this point I don’t care because no useful information is going to come out anytime soon, and I doubt I will ever know the real sequence of events.
Knowing that I will probably never really know, I can judge the result. What I know of the result is that I really don’t think there is a sequence of events that led to the loss of maybe 20 lives that isn’t filled with mistakes. I view these mistakes as the IDF’s responsibility. They fired the guns. The result is inexcusable. I see things this way regardless of the Ghandiness levels of the protesters’ tactics.
So you are telling me that even if the facts clearly proved that the deaths were deliberately planned in advance as a provocation by the militants (and mind you, I’m not saying it - I’m simply assuming it for the purpose of the question) - even then - you would still sympathize with them and fault the Israeli commandos?
Like I said, perhaps I missed a sentence but I did not see where it said he was actually there. I am assuming he was either on a helicopter or a boat nearby. I think he reported what the soldiers told him and I sincerely doubt he was on the Mavi Mamara. That really isn’t the type of evidence I prefer, but if he was on those ropes getting pelted or in the chopper looking down on soldiers getting pelted right from the get-go then I appreciate the information.
Do the events described by that reporter make it seem reasonable that more than a dozen people were killed? Not at all.