The Arab Spring and "the War on Terror"

[Swerbs]

They're just going to keep doing this until there is no one left aren't they? 

[Eames]

Don't expect any action against Israel. It won't happen. The have US sponsored carte blanche to do whatever the **** they like.

 

This is not an action motivated by self defence, this is a 21st century pogrom. The situation in my eyes is comparible with Northern Ireland, imagine that the British Government responded to the Manchester bombings or Enniskillen but having the RAF carpet bomb the Bog Side. Thats what happening here.

 

An absolute disgrace and a travesty that the UN is doing nothing about it.

[omariqy]

Ethnic Cleansing.

In other news, 2,500 Syrians killed over Ramadan. 

[peterms]

Don't expect any action against Israel. It won't happen. The have US sponsored carte blanche to do whatever the **** they like.

 

This is not an action motivated by self defence, this is a 21st century pogrom. The situation in my eyes is comparible with Northern Ireland, imagine that the British Government responded to the Manchester bombings or Enniskillen but having the RAF carpet bomb the Bog Side. Thats what happening here.

 

An absolute disgrace and a travesty that the UN is doing nothing about it.

 

It's even worse than that.  The apparent trigger was the killing of three Israeli youths, supposedly by Hamas.  But the Israeli government claimed it was Hamas, concealed information to the contrary for many days, encouraged the stoking up of a mood of violence in the country, and then launched their attacks, only later letting it be known that it was not a Hamas-sponsored incident.  Utterly cynical, duplicitous, and showing no concern for the victims' families, on top of the systematic barbarity of the war of terror they have launched.

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

I thought this was worth sharing,

 

Link

 

 

 

My great-grandfather’s brother, Michael Adler, was a distinguished rabbi who in 1916 compiled the “Prayer Book for Jewish Sailors and Soldiers” at the front during World War I. As “chaplain,” he toured battlefields administering last rites. At the end of the war he asked if British Jews had done their duty.

 

“Did those British citizens of the House of Israel to whom equality of rights and equality of opportunity were granted by the State some sixty years ago, did these men and women do their duty in the ordeal of battle?” he wrote. “Our answer is a clear and unmistakable YES! English Jews have every reason to be satisfied with the degree of their participation both at home and on the battlefronts in the struggle for victory. Let the memory of our sacred dead — who number over 2,300 — testify to this.”

 

The question for European Jewry was always the same: belonging. Be they French or German, they worried, even in their emancipation, that the Christian societies that had half-accepted them would turn on them. Theodor Herzl, witnessing French anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus case, wrote “The Jewish State” in 1896 out of the conviction that full acceptance for the Jews would never come.

 

Herzl was prescient. Zionism was born of a reluctant conclusion: that Jews needed a homeland because no other place would ever be home. Scrawny scholars would become vigorous tillers of the soil in the Holy Land. Jews would never again go meekly to the slaughter.

 

The ravages of European nonacceptance endure. I see within my own family how the disappearance of a Jewish woman grabbed by Nazis on the streets of Krakow in 1941 can devour her descendants. I understand the rage of an Israeli, Naomi Ragen, whose words were forwarded by a cousin: “And I think of the rest of Europe, who rounded up our grandparents and great-grandparents, and relatives — men, women and children — and sent them off to be gassed, no questions asked. And I think: They are now the moral arbiters of the free world? They are telling the descendants of the people they murdered how to behave when other anti-Semites want to kill them?”

 

Those anti-Semites would be Hamas, raining terror on Israel, whose annihilation they seek. No state, goes the Israeli case, would not respond with force to such provocation. If there are more than 1,000 Palestinian deaths (including 200 children), and more than 50 Israeli deaths, Israel argues, it is the fault of Hamas, for whom Palestinian victims are the most powerful anti-Israeli argument in the court of world opinion.

 

I am a Zionist because the story of my forebears convinces me that Jews needed the homeland voted into existence by United Nations Resolution 181 of 1947, calling for the establishment of two states — one Jewish, one Arab — in Mandate Palestine. I am a Zionist who believes in the words of Israel’s founding charter of 1948 declaring that the nascent state would be based “on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel.”

 

What I cannot accept, however, is the perversion of Zionism that has seen the inexorable growth of a Messianic Israeli nationalism claiming all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River; that has, for almost a half-century now, produced the systematic oppression of another people in the West Bank; that has led to the steady expansion of Israeli settlements on the very West Bank land of any Palestinian state; that isolates moderate Palestinians like Salam Fayyad in the name of divide-and-rule; that pursues policies that will make it impossible to remain a Jewish and democratic state; that seeks tactical advantage rather than the strategic breakthrough of a two-state peace; that blockades Gaza with 1.8 million people locked in its prison and is then surprised by the periodic eruptions of the inmates; and that responds disproportionately to attack in a way that kills hundreds of children.

 

This, as a Zionist, I cannot accept. Jews, above all people, know what oppression is. Children over millennia were the transmission belt of Jewish survival, the object of what the Israeli novelist Amos Oz and his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger have called “the intergenerational quizzing that ensures the passing of the torch.” No argument, no Palestinian outrage or subterfuge, can gloss over what Jewish failure the killing of children in such numbers represents.

 

The Israeli case for the bombardment of Gaza could be foolproof. If Benjamin Netanyahu had made a good-faith effort to find common cause with Palestinian moderates for peace and been rebuffed, it would be. He has not. Hamas is vile. I would happily see it destroyed. But Hamas is also the product of a situation that Israel has reinforced rather than sought to resolve.

 

This corrosive Israeli exercise in the control of another people, breeding the contempt of the powerful for the oppressed, is a betrayal of the Zionism in which I still believe.

Edited July 30, 2014 by CarewsEyebrowDesigner

[Eames]

Can't really argue with any of that can you?

[tonyh29]

Ethnic Cleansing.

In other news, 2,500 Syrians killed over Ramadan. 

 

many of whom had their heads put on spikes and on display as a warning 

 

 

meanwhile everyone just wonders who will get evicted from the Big Brother house

[Vive_La_Villa]

Ethnic Cleansing.

In other news, 2,500 Syrians killed over Ramadan.

many of whom had their heads put on spikes and on display as a warning

meanwhile everyone just wonders who will get evicted from the Big Brother house

What can anyone do?

[Eames]

 

 

Ethnic Cleansing.

In other news, 2,500 Syrians killed over Ramadan.

many of whom had their heads put on spikes and on display as a warning

meanwhile everyone just wonders who will get evicted from the Big Brother house

What can anyone do?

 

1. Freeze ALL of Asad's international assests and issue an International warrant for his arrest should he try to leave Syria.

2. Do the same for all Syrian and opposition leading figures.

3. Deploy an international Peacekeeping force to prevent both sides fighting and stabilise the situation 

4. Deploy a full scale humanitarian intervention to provide urgent assistance where required

5. Immidiate short term import/export ban on all good and services.

 

would all be good starts.

[tonyh29]

 

 

Ethnic Cleansing.

In other news, 2,500 Syrians killed over Ramadan.

many of whom had their heads put on spikes and on display as a warning

meanwhile everyone just wonders who will get evicted from the Big Brother house

What can anyone do?

 

 

we live in a world where the twitter brigade can get off their arses to stop a Simon Cowell act from getting to number 1 and join any other number of aren't we clever bandwagons  ... so i'd suggest they actually try doing something worthwhile for a change  ... social media isn't just for posting pictures of what you had for lunch 

 

1m took to the streets for Blair's  illegal war  in 2003  , think how many could be mobilised now   ......

[peterms]

we live in a world where the twitter brigade can get off their arses to stop a Simon Cowell act from getting to number 1 and join any other number of aren't we clever bandwagons  ... so i'd suggest they actually try doing something worthwhile for a change  ... social media isn't just for posting pictures of what you had for lunch 

 

1m took to the streets for Blair's  illegal war  in 2003  , think how many could be mobilised now   ......

Social media is being used to some effect to raise awareness and tell the real story, which is part of the reason the Israelis are trying to destroy power supplies, because all these images of kids with their brains spilling out are unhelpful to the official narrative.

Perhaps it's starting to have some effect. The BBC still give far more credence than they should to Israeli lies, and the language they use is still calculated to head off the usual orchestrated Israeli complaints. However, they are starting to challenge some of the lies, and something on World at One today and another programme yesterday actually directly challenged the lies of the Israeli spokesman. I see that as being connected with the widespread horror and outrage that exists about this war of terror, and that is more down to social media than the fudged and constrained reports carried by the mainstream media.

Social media can also be used to some effect by people like Russell Brand, mocking and undermining the propagandist shite peddled by the likes of Fox News. This reaches a number of people who may have taken little interest previously.

There were quite a lot of people mobilised on the streets of cities across the world, last Saturday. And the boycott, divest, sanction movement is growing. Social media play a part in promoting these things.

I share your feeling that social media is mostly used for trivia, but I also think these more positive uses should be recognised.

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

I don't care if people tweet or go on a march about Israel or Syria or not. We (average person) make sod all difference either way.

Edited July 30, 2014 by CarewsEyebrowDesigner

[MakemineVanilla]

I don't care if people tweet or go on a march about Israel or Syria or not. We (average person) make sod all difference either way.

 

It seems likely that the people have the power via the social media to dictate which war the media give the most coverage to, but it seems unlikely whether they can change US foreign policy or the UK's tendency follow the US in lock-step.

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

I'm probably just bitter about my experiences as a hot blooded 13 year old protesting against the Iraq War and seeing the British Guvmint going ahead with their oil grab despite hundreds of thousands of people on the streets saying no. One forgets that this isn't a democracy and the people have no say in the matter. What? We do? Well, shit.

 

Yes I was a one of those kids.

[omariqy]

I was thinking about the argument about Hamas using human shields therefore Israel is not in the wrong for targeting those areas where they are being used as it is Hamas' fault for using them.  Whilst it is obviously wrong to do, I was thinking of an analogy.  If a policeman faced with a criminal using a human shield whilst firing at him from a distance.  The policeman then used a grenade to blow up both the criminal and civilian.  Would he/she be applauded and justified in their action because they were being fired at.  Or would public opinion be that he/she should've avoided the civilian casualty at all cost?

I'm probably just bitter about my experiences as a hot blooded 13 year old protesting against the Iraq War and seeing the British Guvmint going ahead with their oil grab despite hundreds of thousands of people on the streets saying no. One forgets that this isn't a democracy and the people have no say in the matter. What? We do? Well, shit.

 

Yes I was a one of those kids.

 

Yet every war started is in the name of our freedom/democracy.  There is no such thing in this world.

[Eames]

I was thinking about the argument about Hamas using human shields therefore Israel is not in the wrong for targeting those areas where they are being used as it is Hamas' fault for using them.  Whilst it is obviously wrong to do, I was thinking of an analogy.  If a policeman faced with a criminal using a human shield whilst firing at him from a distance.  The policeman then used a grenade to blow up both the criminal and civilian.  Would he/she be applauded and justified in their action because they were being fired at.  Or would public opinion be that he/she should've avoided the civilian casualty at all cost?

He should have avoided the civilian casualty at all costs - or at very least used a method of intervention that was not guaranteed to cause the civilian enormous suffering.

 

The Israeli's could put boots on the ground and go after Hamas street by street. They won't because the risk to their own soldiers would be deemed too high for public opinion to stomach. Far easier to use tank fire and fighter bombers.

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

They aren't using human shields anyway.

[omariqy]

Jeremey Bowen at the BBC said he had seen no evidence of Hamas using human shields.  But then again that is only one persons account.

[peterms]

Human shields:
 

                

 

[Risso]

I did see a video the other day (at the same time as the Palestinian purportedly being shit by a sniper) that showed Hamas firing rockets, whicle being surrounded by a watching group of civilians including kids.  As ever, it's almost impossible to know if it was real or fake.