Senate Israel/Palestine

Even with my heritage, and having friends spending time/living in Israel over the years, it's just about impossible with this iteration of the conflict to not seriously sympathize & consider much of the Palestinian point-of-view here.

 

I wonder if the flight ban will be indefinite at this point?

 

I thought you were Armenian.

 

On my mother's side... my father's heritage is Jewish. I identify/am very comfortable with both.

 

How many of your friends/family members have traveled to there in the past?

 

Several ex-high school classmates/chums have spent summers there; one in particular lived there for I think about 4+ years, give or take. Other family members -dear friends who I consider family are included there- have either done business there, or had relatives, etc, who emigrated from Israel. And I'm certain some of those folks took the Birthright-trip at some point in their lives.

 

http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/24/world/meast/mideast-crisis/index.html?c=homepage-t

Israel had to defend itself from the evil UN shelter, right?

 

Jesus wept.

 

Does any report say it was intentionally targeted, Vivec?

Unlike the Turkish Arab protestors attacking the Israeli football team?

I mean, we've already established most people think that Hamas hitting someone with a rocket is a "happy accident" so there can be no "unhappy accidents" on the other side?

 

Pinhead... When did you show up? Who opened the puzzle box?

 

Pinhead never said "Jesus wept"!

 

yeah, he was directing the chains right? By posting the quote, you're Frank, and Pinhead is Pinhead. The joke wouldn't have been much of a joke if I posted "Hey, Frank" and people were like Frank? Who is this Frank?

Ah, nvrmnd. Where's the Joker .gif?

 

There are going to be more "unhappy accidents" because Israel is conducting a military operation in a place where civilians cannot leave. I posted in the previous page that the UN established that there was no place for civilians to seek shelter from Israeli attacks. Furthermore, the people running this shelter gave Israel the coordinates of this shelter explicitly telling them this was a shelter for civilians.

According to the UN, 75% of Palestinian casualties are civilians. That's not an unhappy accident; that's Israel not giving a ****.

 

100% of Hamas rocket attack casualties are civilians. Oh, look, STATISTICS!

 

Call me when 700 Israelis are killed in 3 weeks.

Also I never said Hamas was good so I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean.

 

STATISTICS!

 

Yeah I've seen a similar thing by white racists who say "blacks kill blacks all the time why do they complain about white people?"

Good company you keep, dp4m.

 

Yes, clearly that's what I was saying. Thanks for that.

 

That's basically what it means. What, you gonna start J-Roding now?

Really dp, what are you getting at behind the ****posting? Was I wrong to have posted the news story? Does Israel hold no responsibility whatsoever? Do you even have a defense or you gonna ****post another "STATISTICS?"

 

That's not all it means, though. Clearly, any death and destruction and killing of innocents is wrong -- and of course it's missing the nuances of who was supplying both sides of the Iran/Iraq conflict as well as plenty of the brown-on-brown killings in the Middle East -- but even you have to admit that there's scant international outrage when the Middle East goes to war with each other unless it involves Israel.

I don't disagree that civilians are dying in Gaza. I don't disagree that it's horrible. I do disagree with the notion that Israel should somehow stop defending itself against rocket attacks, or that somehow the Hamas leader being in a five-star hotel in Qatar giving orders and reiterating that he's ready for a cease-fire when Israel capitulates while Hamas has grafted money that could have been used for aid (or building bomb shelters, since that's apparently a point of contention on the Israeli side -- that's they're prepared) rather than building fortified underground tunnels for war materiel movement.

Accidents happen in war. If you don't want accidents to happen in a war -- don't start a war.

 

No, I don't have to admit that. There was plenty of outrage when Assad started killing unarmed protesters in Syria and his indiscriminate killing of civilians during the subsequent civil war. There was plenty of outrage over ISIS' brutality in both Iraq and Syria. You claim here is just factually untrue.

At what point is Israel no longer defending itself?

Palestinian civilians didn't start a war.

Further, why are you refusing to address the fact that there is simply no place for civilians in Gaza to escape the fighting?

 

Because, frankly, while it's horrible that civilians are getting killed if there's nowhere for them to go -- then it's the responsibility of their government to protect them. Wait, what's that? Hamas used the money to build tunnels and steal? Whoops!

The Syrian outrage was basically until the chemical weapons were "taken away" -- a dubious claim, given the later attacks early this year -- but should honestly have started when Rafik Hariri was assassinated in Lebanon (presumably under Syrian orders; of course, Syria blames Mossad). UN puts it on Lebanese and Syrian intelligence forces; it's almost like Star Trek VI in practice! Roddenbury was right!

And I see almost nothing in modern news broadcasts of any substance in the US about Lebanon, Syria, ISIS, etc. Everyone's focused squarely on Israel these days. Despite fighting raging on everywhere else.

 

I see AIPAC is going strong in here.

 

Sorry, I don't lobby (for this reason; I don't support all of AIPAC's goals except self-defense).

 

You're joking, right? Because the reason Gazans have no where to go is because Israel and Egypt keep them trapped in Gaza. Hamas building tunnels is a good thing because it actually allows Palestinians to escape.

But let's go with your idea that the government in Gaza should protect Palestinian civilians but aren't. So does that mean that suddenly their lives are forfeit? It's no one else's responsibility to not attack Palestinian civilians?

Israel is defending itself when it shoots Hamas rockets out of the sky. Israel isn't defending itself when its bombing buildings it told Palestinian civilians to go to (see my link in the previous page about that).

It's entirely your fault that you're only seeing news stories about Israel and Gaza. I routinely see stories about ISIS, Syria, Burma, etc. I mean, if I listened to CNN all day I can't go around saying "The only thing Americans care about are missing airplanes!"

 

Actually, it's worse than that -- I'm stuck in Fox News-land for the next week or so (shudder). But even so, it's not just CNN. Although, I fully-agree with you that I expect CNN just to start shooting planes out of the sky at this point for ratings (even if they don't have to right now).

And, really? "Hey, they're firing rockets at us, what do we do?" "Eh, nothing -- we don't want to go in there and make sure they can't launch rockets at us."

And whose fault is it Egypt keeps Gazans in Gaza? Why isn't Egypt -- who helped try and broker the cease-fires -- trying to help refugees?