Obscanity: You'll know it when you see it

Thats because there are no injured Israeli Children!!! Show pictures if you have some. Can’t believe the same people that claim to have been victims of the terrible holocausts are doing holocausts to others! Evil will has to be terminated oneday.

Are you fucking kidding me?

To Hamas, all of Israel is a settlement. So as long as there is an Israel, they will keep attacking. The UN resolutions refer to the territories, but Hamas interprets them to mean all of Israel.

So Israel is to blame for Rwanda, and Cambodia, and Darfur, and the Armenian genocide? Are they to blame for the Indonesian tsunami too? Perhaps Israel caused Hurricane Katrina as well. We all know Jews control everything, even the weather, right?

Do you even KNOW what goes on in this world? The Gaza population is well over a million. If Israel wanted to engage in mass slaughter, you’d see death tolls in the 5-digit range, not the 3-digit range. You forget how many people a single building can hold.

If Israel really wanted to kill the Palestinians, they’d be GONE. You know Israel has the strength to do it. They don’t WANT to. Gaza has had more deaths because the population density is higher, and more have been children because there are simply more children there. The birthrate in Gaza is one of the highest in the world, and in Gaza children actually make up more than half of the population. When Hamas stops hiding artillery in schools and hospitals and other places they KNOW are heavily populated, particularly with children, they will see their death toll go down. Hamas turns people into martyrs without their consent in the hopes that it will garner world sympathy. The Palestinians have control over the West Bank and Gaza. Do you see them using their control to better the lives of the people there? No. They simply take the opportunity to launch rockets from a closer starting point. If they really cared about their people, they would stop attacking. If they stopped attacking, Israel would stop retaliating.

As for the “85% of land” in Israel, you are aware that much of the land owned by Israel was *purchased* by Jews in the 19th and 20th century, right? Not to mention that many Jews never even left Israel. And how could Israel be a bad neighbor for 100 years when it was only created in 1948?

And how do you explain the Palestinian children slaughtered by Hamas the other day? You blame that on Israel too?

You know nothing about the situation in Israel. All you know is what you want to know – you hate Jews, and therefore you see what you want to see. You have already revealed yourself to be a Holocaust denier, which pretty much kills your credibility anyway.

By the way, I’m not Israeli. And I’m not a “sir.”

HEY are you fucking kidding me? How did those settlers make those settlements? The israeli military killed off the Palestinians to bulldoze their homes to make way for settlers from Europe and Russia!

BY THE WAY THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I HAVE EVER SEEN AMERICAN MEDIA COVER THE PALESTINIAN SIDE! ALTHOUGH THEY MAKE SURE THEY COVER THE ISRAELI SIDE BUT DAMM THIS IS A SHOCKER! USUALLY THEY HAVE SOME ISRAELI GUY SAYING THAT PALESTINIANS ARE EVIL. THE AMERICAN MEDIA USUALLY SHOWS SOME CRAZY BROWN ARAB GUY YELLING AND SCREAMING! I BELEIVE ISRAEL HAS THE RIGHT TO EXIST BUT WHAT I CAN’T STAND IS WHEN PEOPLE WHO WERE ONCE VICTIMS OF THE HOLOCAUST BECOME OPPESSORS THEMSELVES. BY THE WAY ISRAELI CHILDREN DON’T GET TEAR GASED, BOMBED, AND SHOT BY MILITARY LIKE THE PALESTINIAN CHILDREN! YEAH THERE HAVE BEEN ISRAELI CASUALTIES BUT NOT AS MANY AS PALESTINIAN CASUALTIES!!

PALESTINIANS HAVE THE LARGEST REFUGEE CRISIS BECAUSE OF ISRAEL!! FOR THE MEDIA TO HAVE ISRAELI AND AMERICAN POLICTICIANS JUSTIFY MURDERING CIVILLIANS, SHOWS YOU THAT THE AMERICAN MEDIA WILL ALWAYS SIDE WITH ISRAEL.

LOL! ITS FUNNY IF ANYONE HAS SYMPATHY FOR A PALESTINIAN EVEN IF THEY ARE ALSO PRO-ISRAELI, THEY ARE GONNA BE CALLED ANTI-SEMITIC!!

Sanford, sounds good, except that humanitarian aid needs to be allowed into Gaza *now* and remain consistent, not just come after a period of calm. People are starving, without running water, and without adequate medical care. They need humanitarian aid now. If Israel waits to allow humanitarian aid in until Hamas recognizes Israel’s right to exist… let’s just say everybody in Gaza will have died of old age before the supply hovercraft arrive. 😛 Hamas doesn’t want peace. What really needs to happen is regime change. In any event, Hamas would like nothing more than to keep its people in a state of agony and starvation – it only breeds more anger and hatred, and garners more world sympathy, which is its goal.

Plus, bear in mind that even humanitarian agencies are admitting that only about 25% of those killed are civilians. The rest are Hamas fighters. People seem to think Israel is just indiscriminately killing wherever they can. If that was happening, you’d see a hell of a lot more deaths – the population of Gaza is over a million in a tiny, overcrowded lot of land. If Israel wasn’t trying to avoid civilians, you’d see at least several thousand dead in the first few days.

You want to talk about whole families disappearing? George W. Bush is responsible for the deaths of thousands upon thousands of Iraqi civilians. And the United States literally nuked several hundred thousand civilians in Japan during WWII – entire cities completely vanished. Israel has a far greater conscience than the US will ever have when it comes to military action.

Hey Faith,

Actually Hamas does the same thing, in terms of proportion – it kidnaps Israeli soldiers and demands the release of hundreds of Palestinian extremists in exchange for the life of one – or in many cases the corpse of one – Israeli soldier. Similarly, when the borders were less secure, when Israel would kill one Hamas operative who was responsible for an attack in Israel, Hamas would respond with a suicide bombing in a cafe, school or bus. If Hamas *could* kill more people, they certainly would. The fact that their rockets are inefficient doesn’t negate the fact that 1) the rockets are getting better and larger and capable of striking deeper into Israel, where more people live (BTW, rockets are now hitting NORTHERN Israel), and 2) their goal is to kill as many Israelis as they possibly *can,* while Israel exercises restraint and notifies people when they’re going to attack, as they did at the Egyptian border, where hundreds of Palestinian families have cleared away because Israel let them know they would be striking Hamas’s weapon-smuggling tunnels tomorrow morning. If Israel had the same mentality as Hamas, they would simply bomb the fuck out of the entire region, with no thought to the number of deaths. The death toll would be much, much higher. Multiples of multiples. And if Hamas had Israel’s military strength? There wouldn’t be a Jew left in the Middle East. Not a living one, anyway.

I do think that Israel’s mentality has a lot to do with survivor mentality. They operate on the principal of “Never Again” – as in, they were led “like sheep to the slaughter” once, and they don’t want to sit back and let it happen again. We lost a full third of our population in the Holocaust, and we’d like not to lose another few million, which is what many people in the Middle East would sincerely like to see. Hamas’s end goal is not peace; it’s the actual destruction of Israel and the slaughter of all the Jews there, and preferably worldwide. From what I hear, even local protests here in the States have included people screaming out, “GO BACK TO THE OVENS! YOU NEED A BIG OVEN, THAT’S WHAT YOU NEED!” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGaCOHhACzo) This is more than a fight over land. It’s an attempt to finish what Hitler started – not that they didn’t help him in the first place. For a guy who didn’t like non-Aryan people, he was pretty damned chummy with Middle Eastern Arab leaders, who had a great interest in seeing him succeed – because they hated Jews looooong before 1948. This is not a matter of European settlers vs. native indigenous people. It’s a deeply emotional family dispute that’s been going on for thousands of years, and which will never, ever be resolved. Even in the Koran, Ishmael is the child Abraham really loved, and Hagar his true wife. Isaac was a consolation child. The Koran paints Ishmael as the son Abraham almost sacrificed, and views him as Abraham’s true heir. This is not a fight over land. It’s a fight over Grandpa’s estate.

Also remember that Jews didn’t just come back in and say, “Okay, well, we’ve been gone for a few hundred years but we’d like to come back now, so clear out.” We didn’t choose to leave in the first place – we were removed as slaves. Still, many Jews never left Israel and the Middle East, and over the centuries, when they could return, they did. In many cases they purchased the land from people who were more than happy to sell it, well into the 20th century. And in 1948, in many cases they were expelled into Israel from surrounding countries like Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. I don’t really think it’s the same as it was with the Native Americans, because the Native Americans really didn’t have a concept of “selling land” since they didn’t believe one could own nature. They were duped by the colonists, and deliberately and systematically either forced to convert to Christianity, and/or painted as savages and slaughtered. The Arabs in Palestine knew full well that they were selling land that they owned, and they certainly weren’t the targets of a genocide the way the Native Americans were.

I don’t think Israel’s response is going to work. But what else can they do? The people in Gaza elected Hamas to leadership. Hamas will never stop trying to destroy Israel, and any cease fire simply “reduces” the number of attacks – Hamas even continued firing on Israeli militias during the time that Israel halted actions in order to let humanitarian aid into Gaza. Their idea of a cease fire is “cease fire until we have enough time to reload,” and they really don’t care how many people die. There is video footage of Hamas operatives literally launching rockets into Israel from a UN elementary school in Gaza. They have full expectation that Israel will return fire from the direction in which the rocket came – and they don’t care. How do you enter into peace negotiations with people who don’t care about living or dying?

I really don’t think Israel’s response had anything to do with Obama. Remember that Israel also held elections recently and are under new leadership, and this has been escalating for months because the “cease fire” (during which Hamas had launched about a dozen rockets per month into Israel) expired recently, which led to a massive increase in the number of rockets being launched deeper and deeper into Israel, necessitating a response.

600 dead, 130 of them children, yes – but only 25% of the dead are civilians, according to the UN. This means that 75% are NOT civilians. Gaza has a MASSIVELY large population density, and over a million people. 600 dead is horrible, but the count would be WAY, WAY higher if Israel was not exercising restraint.

What sort of response do you think the United States would have if Mexico launched one rocket into San Diego or Los Angeles? This isn’t a matter of people within a country fighting back – these are people who chose to leave in 1948, who were denied entry into the surrounding nations, and rather were kept in refugee camps *by those surrounding nations* with the hope that Israel would eventually be destroyed. They could have allowed people into their country. They chose not to, because that would have meant accepting that Israel was a country. Even when they were allowed in, they were kicked right back out because the PLO tried to take over Jordan. These people have been wronged, for sure, but Israel cannot take all of the blame. Plenty of Arab Palestinians chose to stay in Israel rather than refuse to live among Jews, and they became full Israeli citizens when Israel was established.

By the way, FYI Karin just left for Israel today. I’m just hoping she comes back in one piece. 🙁

p.s. to all who are opposing this Gaza incursion: Do you support fully open borders between the US and Mexico, and the granting of US citizenship to all Mexican citizens who currently reside in Mexico?