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Originally posted by Fir3start3r Shoo fly. Go do some research on an Israeli charter that matches Hamas' or something...

Regardless of what you think the charter might say, Israels actions are of what a terrorist would do.

Hamas' greatest hits in their own words... and this is before the current crisis. Ask yourself, do they value the life of their people, or do the simply value death as a top priority?

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Originally posted by Psy-T :/ you already saw the quoted article in question and replied to it earlier: anyway, here's the source: http://in.reuters.com/article/world...-37272820090103

"Because of the terrorist actions carried by some terrorist figures out of the area of residence against the state of Israel, the IDF was forced to immediately respond and act inside your area of residence," it says. For your own safety you are required to leave the area immediately."

And this justifies their actions how? Leave the area? To where? The place is sealed off. Where are they going to go while their homes are being destroyed?

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i'd like it a lot if i was in a state of war and i valued my life over my property.

Tell that to a Palestinian whose home was bombed or bulldozed. Oh, at least they still have their lives!

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well, how about by selling those weapons they produce, that sounds like a decent moneymaking cow right there. since you seem to imply said production doesn't cost much of anything.

The Qassam rockets were specifically designed to be easy to manufacture, using common tools, and components. The fuel used to propel it is a widely available fertilizer. And the warheads are made up of Urea nitrate, another widely available fertilizer. The Qassams are cheap and easy to produce. So you argument that, firstly they spend their economy making them, secondly they should sell them, is blatantly a false conclusion.

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and that's entirely israel's fault? even if we assume israel is absolutely at fault for any and all aggressions between itself and gaza, it was the people of palestine who elected the hamas - a party which is devoted to war in an extreme way, and claimed to be so from the begining. the palestinans knowingly chose a party which values destruction of israel far more than construction of gaza, hence i submit they themselves are largely to blame for the state of their economy and the percentage of unemployment.

Yes it is Israel's fault. Key word is "blockade". Angry young unemployed men = eager militants for Hamas.

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either you're not including me in "you guys", or your view is distorted. i fully realize that israel's actions will provoke more palestinians to take up jihad. the problem is, inaction from israel would lead to the very same result. i'll get back to this point later in this post.

Israel gets action, first off, because Palestine is slowly being settled and annexed by Israel, who refuses to fully disengage. What do you expect of the occupied population? That they will accept the cards they've been dealt, and accept national humiliation?

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wasn't the first part already taken care of in the disengagement?

Disengagement? Gaza was hardly disengagement. Look at the West Bank. The place is cut up like Swiss cheese with radical Israeli settlements.

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as for the second, the underlying grievances of the hamas are israel's existence, not its actions or inactions, just its existence, the only way to address them is to engage in absolute self destruction.

I'm not talking Hamas. I'm talking about the PALESTINIAN grievances. Hamas thrives because the underlying issues are not being addressed or even recognized by Israel.

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the third: no real truce is possible with the hamas, it goes completely against their charter. yes, there have been so-called truces in the past, but during each of those, hamas kept firing at israel.

I simply don't agree.

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the fourth: again, so long as the hamas, or an organization with a similar charter is in power, it doesn't matter what concessions israel makes, it will remain a target for jihad. so why bother giving any more concessions?

Again, perhaps if the underlying issues were addressed, there would not be a jihad.

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now note how you've said that those 5 actions are just the first step, and i assume that by that you realize that it wouldn't end all the aggressions, and it definitely wouldn't end the jihad. again, so long as the hamas or an organization with a similar charter is in power, it won't matter how many concessions israel makes, so long as it exists.

Well, it's fallacious to believe either Israel or Hamas could be eliminated. If both sides realize this, perhaps some progress could be made.

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Originally posted by DJ Damerchi you gotta avoid this line of thinking, children are citizens too. given gaza's high birth rate they have a larger concentration of children.

That's faulty logic. Children, whether Israeli or Palestinian, deserve to die no more than children under the Nazi regime. Does that mean their parents get a free pass on accountability? You don't think German children died during the firebombing of Dresden?

The unfortunate reality of war is that children are often killed. But if you think that Hamas gets a free pass simply because the demographics of the territory they preside over tilt in the favor of non-voting youth... that's just naive. And not at all how the world works. If the parents of Gaza were so concerned with the safety of their own children, why did they elect a violent entity?

Laying the blame solely at the feet of Israel for any civilian casualties is nearly as silly as laying it solely at the feet of the Palestinians.

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This remains the best thing I've read on the subject. Dispassioned and cogent, it appraises both sides soberly.

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05 Jan 2009 09:36 am Proportionality And Terror Noah Pollak asked me to provide some framework for a discussion of proportionality and just war theory with respect to the Israeli attack on Gaza. In re-reading my Catechism and brushing up on just war theory, I am struck first of all by how alien the context seems for the current war. The asymmetric nature of the threat and the emergence of failed states run by mafioso religious fanatics makes everything more complicated. You could argue that this makes just war theory more important, rather than less, since we are in danger of having the rules of war dictated by barbarians. Or you could argue, along with the neocons, that Jihadist barbarism demands a response in kind. I favor the first view. And it is nonetheless fair to say, I think, that Israel's actions in Gaza fail every traditional just war justification. In the history of the West, the laws of war are clear enough. You do not launch a just war if it leads to greater evils than the status quo ante. There must be a reasonable proportion between means and ends. Both sides should be able to acknowledge common human values, even as they fight over territory or ideology. And yet Hamas has never done this; has no capacity for abiding by even minimal moral norms, believes it has a moral responsibility to eradicate the Jewish state, and certainly finds the universalist and liberal moral law embedded in Western and largely Christian culture meaningless outside Islamic hegemony. Israel, for its part, is on a different moral plane than Hamas. Its internal critics write op-eds; they are not taken out and shot. But, in the face of what is, essentially, a 60 year war against enemies on all sides and within, it has long since disappeared down the self-reflecting mirrors of survivalist logic and existential panic. It looks to me like a society in danger of losing its sense of restraint to the logic of violence. It is lashing out because it feels it can do no other and senses its long-term survival at stake. Even if violence does not solve the problem and may make it worse, war can seem a better option now than disappearing passively in the next couple of decades. The stunning near-unanimity of Israelis behind the Gaza attack is proof of this. In Israel, it seems, it is always America in 2002. But the point of just war theory is to give us a vantage point outside any particular contingency. Even though I may provoke a Jewish-Catholic fight here, the Catholic Catechism has as useful and concise a statement of the right of self-defense as anyone: quote: At one and the same time: * the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain; * all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective; * there must be serious prospects of success; * the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition. Let's take each condition separately. Is the damage Hamas has inflicted on Israel "lasting, grave and certain"? Taking the vantage point of the conflict from May 2007 on, Hamas has fired several thousand Qassam Gaza2abidkatibgetty rockets with such imprecision that no distinction between civilian and military targets is meaningful (which is to say they were all war crimes). Until the recent conflict, Israel suffered 11 military deaths, 131 wounded, 8 civilian deaths and 83 wounded, with more than a hundred treated for shock. In a country of several million, these deaths and injuries were sustained within a relatively small and limited geographical area. (Gazans, in the same conflict, with a much smaller population and far more geographically concentrated, suffered 409 military deaths, 436 injured, and 92 civilian deaths - before the current outbreak even started.) The idea that the indefensible damage Hamas has inflicted on Israel makes an "all-out war" on all of Hamas and Gaza morally necessary in Charles Krauthammer's typically nuanced view, is obviously a non-starter. But one recalls that Krauthammer also believes in the moral imperative of torture. Have all other means of ending Hamas's aggression been shown to be impractical or ineffective? At some level, this is meaningless with Hamas. It exists in order to wage total war on Israel. But it is also unclear if the brutal economic embargo on Gaza - imposed by Egypt, Israel and the West for more than a year - was not actually already weakening Hamas from within, and rendering it less popular. It's certainly a plausible reading of recent history. And under just war theory, any possibility that the goal of restraining Hamas or undermining it could be achieved by non-military means renders the current Israeli counter-attack illicit. Are there serious prospects for success? We will see. Perhaps the "don't fuck with the Jews" message will finally be heard and a profound shift will occur in the hearts and minds of Gazans. But the Middle East's history of the past two decades (and its culture of eternal revenge) is not exactly encouraging in this regard. If the goal is to prevent any further missiles ever reaching Israel from Gaza, I can't see it working either. Even if it is immensely successful as a military operation, this is a very hard test to meet. Even a few missiles will represent a "victory" for Hamas among those Muslims whom we need to appeal to. Even if Hamas is effectively wiped out in Gaza, its leadership massacred, its infrastructure badly damaged, it is hard to see who would replace it, or how a completely failed state in Gaza would then be more likely to restrain Islamist violence than even Hamas. If the goal is to persuade Gazans to ditch Hamas, the war has so far been counter-productive, and has certainly exposed the Sunni Arab dictatorships' de facto alliance with Israel against Iran-backed Hamas. So far, the big winner - again! - is Iran. Is the evil inflicted by the war greater than the evil prevented? It seems clear to me at this stage that the answer is yes. The loss of life this past week has been huge - far greater than any other stage of the conflict, and out of all proportion to the damage Hamas has inflicted on Israel. In terms of casualties, we are talking about ratios of roughly a hundred to one. That makes this far from a close call morally. There is a reason, in other words, for many Europeans' horror. This is an extremely one-sided war, with one side essentially being attacked at will in a way that cannot avoid large numbers of civilian deaths. It is all very well understanding and sympathizing with Israel's dilemma in tackling Jihadist terror, as we should and must; it is another thing to watch women and children being terrorized and killed as they currently are in Gaza, with very little tangible gained as a result in terms of Israeli security. Maybe the long-term gains will shift the balance here. But those now arguing for exactly that proposition are those who believe the Iraq war has been a great success. I need to repeat: There is no "just war" excuse for Hamas' murderous terrorism or for its refusal to acknowledge or peacefully co-exist with Israel. But there's no reading of traditional just war theory that can defend what Israel is now doing and has done either. Maybe I am missing an element here. Or maybe just war theory cannot account for modern terrorism. But if that is the case, then an argument must be made for a new framework of just warfare that can account for that. It does seem to me that the combination of apocalyptic terror and WMDs shift the equation. But with Hamas, we are not talking about WMDs. And we have to acknowledge something the neocons rarely do: Hamas is more democratically legitimate than the King of Jordan, an unelected plutocrat who runs a torture state. Maybe Noah has a response to these points. I'm happy to air it. These are provisional thoughts and I reserve the right to adjust them. But until neoconservatives can do a better job at defending the morality of the current assault, they will lose the battle for global opinion, and deepen the crisis that the Israelis face in the new century.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.c...stion-of-p.html

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nice article, but it doesn't really mention the palestinians' very real grievances.

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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN nice article, but it doesn't really mention the palestinians' very real grievances.

There are links in the original that deal with the rise of Hamas and discuss why Palestinians would turn to a militant group to represent their interests.

Sullivan has always been viewed as pro-Israel... but reading his blog this week you can almost see his mind changing.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i08L09V0_sg

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Best Album Ever:
* Infected Mushroom - B.P.Empire

Is that you Flotser?

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Wow, those BBC camera men must have feared for their lives being "threatened" by two 14 year old boys




Note: Hebron settlers are an extremist tiny fraction of Israeli society, just like every nation has its radicals on all end of the political spectrum. Hamas, however, creates an entire industry of hate, a society that is thoroughly intoxicated from kindergarten up until university.

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"Those are my principles, if you don't like them... well, I have others.”

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Originally posted by TranceGiant Wow, those BBC camera men must have feared for their lives being "threatened" by two 14 year old boys Note: Hebron settlers are an extremist tiny fraction of Israeli society, just like every nation has its radicals on all end of the political spectrum. Hamas, however, creates an entire industry of hate, a society that is thoroughly intoxicated from kindergarten up until university.

LOL...no. There are 500,000 people like this. Look at the West Bank; how it's cut up like Swiss cheese among Israeli extremist groups. And you wonder why Palestinians resist your encroachments.

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