60 civilians die in bombing "mistake" in Qana

[P_Funk]

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/07/30/mideast.main/index.html

37 or so of them are kids. They can't be sure cause some of them are apparently in pieces.

War crime or an honest mistake?

[Deadeye313]

neither. You can't call it a war crime unless it's intentional and Hezbollah is more at fault for launching rockets from civilian centers than Isreal is for blowing the whole block to smitherines.

If you look at websites following the aftermath, you see dead muslim babies being paraded in front of cameras. I think Rush Limbaw is right: "a dead muslim kid is more important than dead isreali kids" to these barbarians. I personally won't lose sleep over it. Their families were told they had to get out and if they stayed, they got what they deserved. IF they were forced to stay by Hezbollah, then Hezbollah is the ones who should be chained in irons and beaten by the world community for killing their own kids for nothing more than propaganda points.

[scandium]

What does this bring the civilian death toll in Lebanon up to now? 400? 500? Well gee, at least they're willing to admit this one might have been a mistake.... well, sorta:


Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, called it a "horrible, tragic incident." But Gillerman said the dead were "victims of Hezbollah," which he said was using civilian buildings as cover to launch rockets into Israel.

"We are dealing with a ruthless, cynical, cruel enemy, one of the most monstrous terror organizations this world has known," he said. "They have no regard for Israeli life, and they have no regard for Lebanese life."
So let's see... during the course of Israel's levelling Lebanon to the ground Israel bombs a 4 story building housing refugees and reduces it to rubble, but the people who were in the building were actually victims of Hezbollah because, as we all know, Israeli bombs are actually dropped by Hezbollah pilots. :roll:

And as to the rest of this ntwit's remarks, well during the same period Hezbollah accomplished this:

In Israel, police officials said 134 Hezbollah rockets slammed into the Jewish state on Sunday. Officials reported 48 injuries, one of them serious.
37 children killed in just this single IDF incident, while Hezbollah manages to seriously injure one person... hmm... his comments have me imagining Joe Stalin condemning FDR for interring so many Japanese Americans during WWII.

I think this remark says it all:

"Clearly, we did not know the civilians were in the way," said IDF spokesman Jacob Dalal, who added that Israel was exercising its right to defend itself with its campaign of airstrikes.
See if you're Lebanese, or any other nationality, and still haven't managed to flee - at your own peril - your country that Israel has destroyed most of the routes out of, well then you're just in the way and so much cannon fodder. This is beginning to resemble more and more another historical parallel but maybe I'll go into that later.

[August]

So let's see... during the course of Israel's levelling Lebanon to the ground Israel bombs a 4 story building housing refugees and reduces it to rubble, but the people who were in the building were actually victims of Hezbollah because, as we all know, Israeli bombs are actually dropped by Hezbollah pilots. :roll:

I love how you have to fantasize to try to make a point. Those civilians were little more than human sandbags to Hezbollah, yet that doesn't bother you as much as the Israelis accidentily hitting those sandbags when they try to get at the Hez hiding behind them.

Seriously Scandium, don't you ever get the idea your outrage might be misplaced?

[scandium]

I love how you have to fantasize to try to make a point. Those civilians were little more than human sandbags to Hezbollah, yet that doesn't bother you as much as the Israelis accidentily hitting those sandbags when they try to get at the Hez hiding behind them.

Seriously Scandium, don't you ever get the idea your outrage might be misplaced?
August, you have a bizarre - to me - way of rationalizing this. Children as human sandbags eh? Do you have any kids of your own? That's a rhetorical question by the way, I don't want to make this personal.

Just for hell of it, though let's run with that analogy. Do you know where Qana is within Lebanon? Let me tell you, it is about 15 km from the Israeli border; the Katyusha rockets that Hezbollah are firing have a range of 10 km, making Qana a less than ideal location for Hezbollah to launch rockets into Israel from. Therefore the civilians there could not have been used as "sandbags" to hide behind, although Israel claims rockets were being fired from the town; I don't believe them.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5228224.stm

Witnesses said the early-morning strike hit the three-storey building where families had been sheltering in the basement, crushing it sideways into an enormous crater.

One survivor said the "bombing was so intense that no-one could move".

Elderly, women and children were among those killed in the raid, which wrought destruction over a wide area.

Reporters spoke of survivors screaming in grief and anger, as some scrabbled through the debris with bare hands.

"We want this to stop," a villager shouted.

"May God have mercy on the children. They came here to escape the fighting."
Rescuers found the experience too much to cope with.

Our correspondent saw a Red Cross rescue worker sitting in the sunshine just sobbing, overcome with emotion.

Israel said the Shia militant group was responsible for the Qana strike, because it used the town to launch rockets.

The BBC's Jim Muir, in Qana, says many did not have the means - or were too frightened - to flee.

War crime. Period. And when you [as in the IDF, not you personally] begin killing scores of civilians to kill the militants you believe may be among them, then you become yourself a terrorist since that is what terrorists do: kill civilians indiscrimately.

And it is self-defeating. It is mindless, senseless, utterly self-defeating. Here are your 'sand bags':


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/5228392.stm


:nope:

[Yahoshua]

Such innocent children......such innocent children.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AiYI...related&search=

(not justifying the bombing......just correcting the picture a bit).

[Gizzmoe]

Such innocent children......such innocent children.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AiYI...related&search=

The link doesn´t work.

[Yahoshua]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AiYIhdZcOg&search=palestinian%20children%20hate

Fixed.

[The Avon Lady]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AiYIhdZcOg&search=palestinian%20children%20hate

While this movie might serve as a background to what kind of filth Israel is surrounded by, it is not directly relevant to the Qana bombing.

Let's forget about the fact that there are now reports that the building in which these people were killed somehow collapsed 8 hours after the IAF's attack. Let's assume that the IDF directly bombed this and other buildings because the IDFs' drone and plane cameras saw these buildings being used for cover to attack Israel.

So, what is your problem, Scandium? Should we Israelis roll over and die, so that these people may live?

Sorry Charlie! Protocol 1, Article 51, Parag. 7, which forms an integral part of the Geneva Conventions, states clearly:
“The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations. The Parties to the conflict shall not direct the movement of the civilian population or individual civilians in order to attempt to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield military operations.”
And this is from existing GC rules, which still do not and apparently never will be changed to reflect the realities of war against terrorists.

What of these children (http://www.esnips.com/doc/6d8ac786-c06f-4254-ab0e-9405ea4e2175/israeli_children.pps) (warning: very graphic content, just like CNN's uni-sided pro-Arab coverage, let alone BBC's), Scandium? It's OK to pop off Jews one by one, or by the restaurant or bus full or by hurling missiles with 40 kilos of steel balls in them to rip the flesh off of anyone seeking shelter wherever they may fall?

Normally, I wouldn't want to post such "sympathy" pictures but just scan through all of the Mideast press photos from AP, AFP, Reuters and what not over the last six years and you'll notice a pattern of propaganda that has been spoon-fed to the world for decades and is only getting worse. Suggested reading: Jihad Playbook (http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/012451.php). Oh, damn me, another JW link that points out what the morning newspapers wouldn't think of discussing.

Please, Scandium, come to Haifa and die for us, you big human rights hero. Frankly, I prefer calling them in contrast "Human Lefts" or "Human Wrongs". Take your pick.

For the rest of you sane folks, here's who to blame, as if you had any doubts:

WORLD COUNCIL OF THE CEDARS REVOLUTION: HEZBOLLAH IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE MASSACRE (http://cedarsrevolution.org/content/view/31/9/)

Berlin daily Tagesspiegel: Letter to the editor (http://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/archiv/30.07.2006/2660279.asp). This letter, in German (Skybird, your translation assistance, should you think anything additional is necessary) is from one Dr. Mounir Herzallah, a Shiite from South Lebanon. Dr. Herzallah reports on how Hezbollah-terrorists came to his town, dug a munitions depot and then built a school and a residence directly over it. He writes:
“Laughing, a local sheikh explained to me that the Jews lose either way: either because the rockets are fired at them or because, if they attack munitions depot, they are condemned by world public opinion on account of the dead civilians.” Hezbollah, he says, uses the civilian population “as a human shield and then when they are dead as propaganda.”
Nothing more really needs to be said. The enemy of humanity are the Jihadists and their supporters and their excusers and their hypocritical tolerators, whether in Lebanon or Gaza or Iraq or Saudi Arabia or Spain or England or France or Norway or Sweden or Indonesia or Canada or the US. They're all the same and Israel is just a stumbling block in their greater Jihad objectives.

There are a million more commentaries showing the immorality of the mass media, the UN, the abominable left and the world's hypocritical politicians. I won't bother copying and pasting them. You can all do the same.

What a disgraceful world we live in.

[P_Funk]

I love this. Its amazing. So what if Hezbollah is hiding behind civilians? That doesn't give Israel the right to kill innocent people. A man takes a child hostage and the SWAT team kills them both saying "well its the man's fault cause he took the kid hostage". No one is gonna say its okay to shoot wildly into a civilian area. It is againt international law to act without significant discretion when attacking an area with a huge civilian population. The onus is on Israel if they want to wage a war. The invading army (israel) has obligations. They cannot say that their country is under threat and then just bomb the hell out of a country.

And the whole "they were told to leave" thing is not as easy as they say. Firstly within the first few days all of the roads and bridges were destroyed. Secondly the Israeli Air Force has been attacking many civilian vehicles as they tried to flee. So you have children and you know that other families have been attacked directly while trying to flee. Do you risk going out there? Do you stay? These people have no choice to make. And this isn't California. Not everyone has a Minivan and a cabin in the north. It costs money to travel and many of these families are poor. Remember that Lebanon was destroyed 20 years ago and that the government hasn't been able to support peoplein the south.

No it is the obligation of Israel to watch out for the safety of the civilians in the areas they attack. You cannot simply say "well you know... terrorists... sandbags... all that." Besides Israel has laser guided bombs. Israel has essentially an exported American arsenal. They have the technological capability to not kill indiscriminantly. Yet this carefully guided bomb, a bomb which can land within inches of where it is being guided hit a building with nothing but civilians. These weren't young militants. No these were children. Israel had every intention to destroy that particular building.

Even if Hezbollah was attacking from near by so what? Is that what you say to these people? You deserve to die because you happen to sleep 30 metres from someplace a rocket was fired yesterday? And why is Israel trying to wash its hands of responsibility? Its their bombs! They dropped them. You are responsible for your weapons. Yes Hezbollah is bad. yeah they are responsible for their rockets. But you cannot say that hezbollah is responsible for the "mistakes" of Israel. In this world of laser guided bombs and GPS you can't say "oops we thought those 5 year olds sleeping were hairy angry evil militants with giant rockets".

[The Avon Lady]

I love this. Its amazing. So what if Hezbollah is hiding behind civilians? That doesn't give Israel the right to kill innocent people. Yes it does. It doesn't give the right for anyone to target civilians as an objective but the GC states that the responsibility for civilians used as shields while under attack is solely Hizballah's. Try reading.
A man takes a child hostage and the SWAT team kills them both saying "well its the man's fault cause he took the kid hostage". No one is gonna say its okay to shoot wildly into a civilian area. It is againt international law to act without significant discretion when attacking an area with a huge civilian population. Wrong again. Read the GC again, if you even bothered reading it the first time.

And targeting buildings used to hide troops, weapons, supplies or used as cover for attacks is signifcantly discrete and I challenge you to find a military force elsewhere worldwide that does its hardest to make sure the targets are legitimate.
The onus is on Israel if they want to wage a war. Wrong again. Hizballah's attack across Israel's border almost 3 weeks ago and the kidnapping of its soldiers plus the deaths of the soldiers that pursued them is an act of war. Get your facts straight.
The invading army (israel) Israel was invaded first.
has obligations. All sides do. What obligations has Lebanon lived up to? Can you name one?
They cannot say that their country is under threat and then just bomb the hell out of a country. Wrong again. Yes you can, if you're attacked and this attack was simply a last straw for the numerous Lebanese attacks over the 6 years since Israel withdrew from Lebanon in full compliance with the UN's own demands.

And the whole "they were told to leave" thing is not as easy as they say. Firstly within the first few days all of the roads and bridges were destroyed. Secondly the Israeli Air Force has been attacking many civilian vehicles as they tried to flee. Yet all the major media networks showed 1000s fleeing yesterday, with all of the same destroyed roads and passages you keep whining about. Amazing what people do when they finally decide to take the message seriously.

But more improtantly, there is no legal obligation to warn anyone of a pending attack. Oops. Slight oversight on your part.

Regarding civilian vehicles, since Hizballah has been using civilian vehicles, building and even prance around in civilian uniforms, they themselves are again violating the GC and are fully responsible for the outcome, include what becomes the legitimate targeting of civilian vehicles suspected of being used by terrorists. Furthermore, one of the things the IDF dropped warnings about was the danger of the use of civilian vehicles, as Hizballah has been using them over and over again.
So you have children and you know that other families have been attacked directly while trying to flee. Do you risk going out there? Do you stay? These people have no choice to make. Leave by foot.

By the way, you forgot to mention the number of reported incident in which Hizballah threatened under the barrel of a gun entire Christian and Druze villages to remain in their residences, so that Israel would be hesitant to attack. Again you close your eyes.
And this isn't California. Not everyone has a Minivan and a cabin in the north. It costs money to travel and many of these families are poor. There is no obligation on either side of a conflict to provide buses, taxis or trains or free tickets for them.
Remember that Lebanon was destroyed 20 years ago and that the government hasn't been able to support peoplein the south. Then Lebanon should reconsider the cost of beginning a war which they couldn't afford.
No it is the obligation of Israel to watch out for the safety of the civilians in the areas they attack. Not at all, expect for the cases where the absolute intention is to attack civilians. Israel has never done this.
You cannot simply say "well you know... terrorists... sandbags... all that." Yes you can. Go to law school and find out.
Besides Israel has laser guided bombs. Israel has essentially an exported American arsenal. They have the technological capability to not kill indiscriminantly. Yes, Israel has laser guided mosquitos whose bite is deadly. Next!
Yet this carefully guided bomb, a bomb which can land within inches of where it is being guided hit a building with nothing but civilians. You have no idea what you're talking about. Besides go view one of the many of numerous IDF films released all over the internet to see the accuracy of the bombings.
These weren't young militants. No these were children. Israel had every intention to destroy that particular building. Could be and let's assume Israel did want to destroy that building because it was covering up a military target.

Still Israel had every legal right to do so, as much as you would like to whine otherwise. Besides which, if you read the initial mass media reports, most of these people were sleeping/residing in the building's basement. And just what X-ray vision do you think Israeli (or Chinese or American or French) planes have to detect this? More nonsense.
Even if Hezbollah was attacking from near by so what? Is that what you say to these people? You deserve to die because you happen to sleep 30 metres from someplace a rocket was fired yesterday? You died because your own countrymen used you as a shield to attack another country and they think of you as canon fodder.
And why is Israel trying to wash its hands of responsibility? Because they're not responsible. You can repeat the same lie over again. It's still a lie.
Its their bombs! They dropped them. Morally, legally and justifiably so.
You are responsible for your weapons. And they were used responsibly under the rules of international law. Again please tell us what parts of the GC Lebanon has so far abided by in this war which they started. I'm waiting for your very long list.
Yes Hezbollah is bad. yeah they are responsible for their rockets. But you cannot say that hezbollah is responsible for the "mistakes" of Israel. There was no mistake here. If necessary I hope Israel will never hesitate to keep on destroying any military objective used to attempt to kill my countrymen.
In this world of laser guided bombs and GPS you can't say "oops we thought those 5 year olds sleeping were hairy angry evil militants with giant rockets". I never said oops. Neither did Israel.

Oops.

Over and out. Have a nice day. :)

[Skybird]

Hezbollah abuses civilians, and kids, very much as human sandbags, as it was labelled by someone above. Two days ago I linked you guys to an article in the New York Times were residents in south Lebanon complained not only about the Israeli bombardment, but expressed their rage about Hizbollah intentionally seeking the nearness to civilians to fire it's missiles, and intentionally moving into Christians quarters to put them at risk - and even shot villagers that tried to flee, insisting that they have to stay to get killed by Israelis bombs so that their death is a media score for Hezbollah. People like Scandium always will fall for this behaviour, but that does not change the correct description of Hezbollah given by AL, I think: they are inhumane scum with totally zero respect for the life of civilians, and even wishing for the death of civilians, and helping to arrange that, so that they can score on the global media stage. Cynical.

[jumpy]

Sry Avon, but in reading your last post I think that's a pretty unfeeling view of the situation for a bunch of people who are seemingly cought between a rock and a very hard place. I can see the Israeli point of view to a degree, but things like this
So what if Hezbollah is hiding behind civilians? That doesn't give Israel the right to kill innocent people.Yes it does. It doesn't give the right for anyone to target civilians as an objective but the GC states that the responsibility for civilians used as shields while under attack is solely Hizballah's. That's a very understanding idea, isn't it? Sorry to push the example to the extreme (and slightly out of context I grant you, but it serves a point) but that's like saying the police who shot that Menezes guy on the London tube should have also slotted the people sitting next to the suspected terrorist, by the same logic because by their association of sitting next to the guy, they might be terrorists too - you just can't tell who's who, so lets kill them all were bound to hit the right persons eventually.

and
Regarding civilian vehicles, since Hizballah has been using civilian vehicles, building and even prance around in civilian uniforms, they themselves are again violating the GC and are fully responsible for the outcome, include what becomes the legitimate targeting of civilian vehicles suspected of being used by terrorists. Furthermore, one of the things the IDF dropped warnings about was the danger of the use of civilian vehicles, as Hizballah has been using them over and over again.
So that's carte blanch to target civillian vehicles then, regardless...

and
You cannot simply say "well you know... terrorists... sandbags... all that." Yes you can. Go to law school and find out. Law is black and white, reality is seldom so clearly deliniated.
None of the above quotations do anything to bolster support of the current action in an international sense

and
Because they're not responsible. You can repeat the same lie over again. It's still a lie. Passing the buck (as I see it) as to who is 'responsible' for who's actions be they on your own initiative or as the IDF claims having their hand 'forced' by hezbollah is evasive and most convenient given the unfortunate collateral damage as reported.

There was no mistake here. If necessary I hope Israel will never hesitate to keep on destroying any military objective used to attempt to kill my countrymen. To me this last is the crux of the matter here; I guess you have to ask how much innocent blood israel is prepared to wade through, how many victims of circumstance can be sacrificed on the alter of expediency, to ensure a lasting peace through war? How much blood will the world stand before it turns it's back on the people of Israel (not just israel, but other countries in the ME too) and leaves them to get on with it?
I'm well aware of the history of the jewish people, dark and pitiful though it has been for the last, - well... since forever really, but specifically the holocaust was what I was thinking - but I would have thought you (collective you) would have had a tighter grip on compassion and understanding of suffering and cruelty given the awful nature of what the (jewish) people have had to endure at the hands of despots and murderers, so that you would not dismiss, so seemingly out of hand, the killing of those who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nobody dismisses the holocaust as 'sorry jooos, you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, crazy nazis... gas chambers... tough luck' (I am not saying the jews are comparable to the nazis... before anybody gets the wrong idea, I am guilty of using the most readily available hyperbole to make a point) but you see what I mean?
I really don't think any of this will change what happens over there- it hasn't in the past and it will not in the future. This latest debacle will only serve to strengthen the hard line oppinion on both sides and draw in and influence more ordinary people into this accutely polarising situation. So, business as usual then.
Pointing fingers and shouting "they started it and we're only doing what we must to defend ourselves!" quickly followed by a laser guided bomb landing on a bunch of school kids tends to fall on deaf ears where I come from, even more so when your governement tries to justify this by declaring the other guy started it and it's no less than he deserved.
I remember at school, I got bullied and teased by this one guy for about 8 months on and off; the teachers knew about it but could do nothing unless they cought him 'red-handed'. Anyway, I lost my temper one day and smacked him in the face with my lunchbox then had a go with my fists - I had reached the end of my tether and would tollerate no more of this guys BS - the result? I was seen behaving in an inappropriate manner by lashing out and was punnished accordingly by the school and despite my protestations of having no choice in my actions I was told that two wrongs don't make a right (if ever a phrase has had more meaning for a situation than in this case, than I don't know what does). Perhaps it's up to the rest of the world to take charge and smack your heads together and be told to pack it in for good. Then again everybody will most likely do nothing, or too little too late.
I guess what I'm tring to say is- Hezbollah is wrong, but so is some of what the IDF is doing now (either by ommision or design it matters not, only the result is important) and denying it only deepens the proverbial hole the respective governements are digging for themselves; or more accurately, enlarging for themselves.
What a pitty.:cry:

[Skybird]

Lebanese website blames Hizbullah for Qana deaths

Anti-Syrian elements in Lebanon openly point finger at Hizbullah as guilty of killing of dozens of civilians in order to curtail plans for disarming group. 'Hizbullah has placed rocket launcher on building's roof and brought invalid children inside in bid to provoke Israeli response,' they write
Roee Nahmias

Is Hizbullah behind the tragic incident (http://www.subsim.com/articles/0,7340,L-3283311,00.html) in the village of Qana that claimed the lives of some 60 people? While the Israeli army continues to investigate the circumstances leading to the building's collapse, some in Lebanon do not hesitate to point the finger at the Shiite organization and claim it is to blame for the death of dozens.
The Lebanese website LIBANOSCOPIE (http://www.libanoscopie.com/fulldoc.asp?doccode=994&cat=2) , associated with Christian elements in the country and which openly supports the anti-Syrian movement called the "March 14 Forces," reported that Hizbullah has masterminded a plan that would result in the killing of innocents in the Qana village, in a bid to foil Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's "Seven Points Plan", which calls for deployment of the Lebanese army in southern Lebanon and the disarming of Hizbullah.
'Disabled children placed inside building'
"We have it from a credible source that Hizbullah, alarmed by Siniora's plan, has concocted an incident that would help thwart the negotiations. Knowing full well that Israel will not hesitate to bombard civilian targets, Hizbullah gunmen placed a rocket launcher on the roof in Qana and brought disabled children inside, in a bid to provoke a response by the Israeli Air Force. In this way, they were planning to take advantage of the death of innocents and curtail the negotiation initiative," the site stated.
The site's editors also claimed that not only did Hizbullah stage the event, but that it also chose Qana for a specific reason: "They used Qana because the village had already turned into a symbol for massacring innocent civilians, and so they set up 'Qana 2'." Notably, the incident has indeed been dubbed "The second Qana massacre" by the Arab media.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3284514,00.html#n

[Fish]

Additional info:

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0%2C7340%2CL-3283816%2C00.html

[The Avon Lady]

Lebanese website blames Hizbullah for Qana deaths
Skybird, I don't bother posting links from Israeli sites as everyone seems to know we Israelis (or Jews, whatever the prefered word) are unreliable cheats and vilians. But if you look in my first post, you'll see I linked to 2 sources based on Lebanese that say the same thing: The Cedars of Lebanon and a letter to the editor of a Berlin newspaper, the latter in German for your reading pleasure.

Jumpy, no time to answer you point by point. I'm willing to shed as much enemy blood as it takes to get them to stop attacking my country, which they are still doing and to establish assurances that this ceases once and for all in the future.

In short, there need no be one more drop of bloodshed, should Lebanon "cave in" to Israel's "extravagant" demands of permanently ceasing attacks against Israel and returning our 2 kidnapped soldiers.

Apparently the Lebanese government thinks the further responses by Israel are worth their not agreeing to the "humiliating and unhonorable" conditions.

Who is it that really doesn't give a damn about Lebanese lives? You looking in the wrong direction.

[Skybird]

Skybird, I don't bother posting links from Israeli sites as everyone seems to know we Israelis (or Jews, whatever the prefered word) are unreliable cheats and vilians. But if you look in my first post, you'll see I linked to 2 sources based on Lebanese that say the same thing: The Cedars of Lebanon and a letter to the editor of a Berlin newspaper, the latter in German for your reading pleasure.

Yes, and yesterday there even was another essay on this on a German site as well. The article I quoted links to the original Lebanese essay, written in French - if I wouldn't be so weak in French I wopuld have posted that instead. I prefer to link or set up the original sources of such article-chains, usually. Something that some people often oversee, and then attack the mirror site and it's added comments instead, for being biased, or whatever.

I learned from the news this morning that now a huge ground offensive has started rolling. Is it another of those expedition-type adventures we have seen in the past, or is this now - finally - the serious and determined operation (whose lack I just was criticising on sunday) to seize the place and then turn every stone in it manually to look what's under it? You probably do not know yourself, but what is your "feeling"?

[The Avon Lady]

I learned from the news this morning that now a huge ground offensive has started rolling. Is it another of those expedition-type adventures we have seen in the past, or is this now - finally - the serious and determined operation (whose lack I just was criticising on sunday) to seize the place and then turn every stone in it manually to look what's under it? You probably do not know yourself, but what is your "feeling"?
This new offensive is nothing to spit about (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060731/od_nm/mideast_llamas_dc;_ylt=AuV9_WJCVmI1By.5QBfmGbUuQE4 F;_ylu=X3oDMTA3NW1oMDRpBHNlYwM3NTc-). :doh:

[jumpy]

Jumpy, no time to answer you point by point. I'm willing to shed as much enemy blood as it takes to get them to stop attacking my country
hehe, no sweat, I'm sure there's more pressing things requiring your attention than chatting here; like 'breeding over a map' perchance? :-j *groan* hehe


I dare say much of the murkyness of this issue is that you can't be sure of shedding 'enemy' blood specifically and not that of ordinary people. The lack of a straight out shooting war against a clearly defined adversary, who would have thought of the trouble it has/will cause. I suppose if you look at it like that, you guys are stuffed no matter what happens or how you decide to react, regardless of how I personally see events transpiring.

[Whistler]

Just because Hizbollah "only" kills a couple Israelis here, wounds a few dozen there, DOES NOT mean anything other than they can't aim their missiles. The funny thing about this is that if Hizbollah had rockets which were half as accurate as Israels, we would have seen 20 Qanas happen in Haifa by now.

Israel has nothing to gain by targetting civilians. IMO they are more humane than that, and if anything would avoid the bad PR.

They continuously drop leaflets to warn civilians to get out of the area. It is not Israels fault that Hizbollah fires from inside villiages and crafts garages for their missile launchers within houses. The terrorists have more to gain from dead Lebanese civilians than the Israelis do.

Also, I will be interested to see what the investigation turns up, as I heard that the IDF thinks the only bomb to land in Qana from them was 8 hrs earlier and 1km away...

[scandium]

Human Rights Watch calls the Qana massacre a war crime.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5232434.stm


Human Rights Watch accused the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) of treating southern Lebanon as a "free-fire zone".

It said the failure to distinguish between civilians and combatants could be judged as a war crime, and called for an UN probe into the conflict.

Israel has insisted that Hezbollah sheltered in Qana and used it as a base to fire rockets across the border.

But Human Rights Watch called on a UN commission to investigate whether serious violations of international law had taken place during the conflict.

"The Israeli military seems to consider anyone left in the area a combatant who is fair game for attack," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.
"Such consistent failure to distinguish combatants and civilians is a war crime."

[The Avon Lady]

Human Rights Watch calls the Qana massacre a war crime.
Big deal.

These are the same liars who recently made false judgements and assumptions about the deaths of Arabs on a Gaza beach.

These are the same one sided phonies whose blatant anti-Israel agenda makes a mockery out of their name for years already.

Tell them they can go to hell. Arab and leftist anarchist tools are of no interest to the civilized world.

Read: Human Rights Watch's Q&A on Lebanon War: Selective and Distorted Application of International Law (http://www.ngo-monitor.org/archives/infofile/hrw_avibell_230706.html), just for starters.

Who in the world appointed this leftist slime as supreme global judge, jury and executioner? Give them a corner office next to Kofi, where they rightfully belong.

[scandium]

http://www.theconservativevoice.com/article/16571.html

THE MORAL CULPABILITY FOR QANA

"Everyone in southern Lebanon is a terrorist and is connected to Hezbollah," roared Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon on July 27."Every village from which a Katyusha is fired must be destroyed," bellowed an Israeli general in a quote bannered by the nation's largest newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth.

The Israeli paper then summarized what the justice minister and general were saying: "In other words, a village from which rockets are fired at Israel will simply be destroyed by fire." That was Thursday.

Sunday, in Qana, 57 of Haim Ramon's "terrorists," 37 of them children, were massacred with precision-guided bombs. Apparently, Katyushas had been fired from Qana, near the destroyed building.

"One who goes to sleep with rockets shouldn't be surprised if he doesn't wake up in the morning," said Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman.

Today, we hear unctuous statements about how Israel takes pains to avoid civilian casualties, drops leaflets to warn civilians to flee target areas, and conforms to all the rules of civilized warfare.

But Israel's words and deeds contradict her propaganda. As the war began, Ehud Olmert accused Lebanon, which had condemned Hezbollah for the killing and capture of the Israeli soldiers, of an "act of war." Army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz publicly threatened "to turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years."

Gillerman, at a pro-Israel rally in New York, thundered, "[T]o those countries who claim that we are using disproportionate force, I have only this to say: You're damn right we are."

"His comments drew wild applause," said the Jerusalem Post.

Though Israel is dissembling now, Gillerman spoke the truth then. No sooner had Hezbollah taken the two Israeli soldiers hostage than Israel unleashed an air war -- on Lebanon. The Beirut airport was bombed, its fuel storage tanks set ablaze. The coast was blockaded. Power plants, gas stations, lighthouses, bridges, roads, trucks and buses were all hit with air strikes.

Within 48 hours, it was apparent Israel was exploiting Hezbollah's attack to execute a preconceived military plan to destroy Lebanon -- i.e, the collective punishment of a people and nation for the crimes of a renegade militia they could not control. It was the moral equivalent of a municipal police going berserk, shooting, killing and ravaging an African-American community, because Black Panthers had ambushed and killed cops.

If Israel is not in violation of the principle of proportionality, by which Christians are to judge the conduct of a just war, what can that term mean? There are 600 civilian dead in Lebanon, 19 in Israel, a ratio of 30-1, though Hezbollah is firing unguided rockets, while Israel is using precision-guided munitions.

[Skybird]

I learned from the news this morning that now a huge ground offensive has started rolling. Is it another of those expedition-type adventures we have seen in the past, or is this now - finally - the serious and determined operation (whose lack I just was criticising on sunday) to seize the place and then turn every stone in it manually to look what's under it? You probably do not know yourself, but what is your "feeling"?
This new offensive is nothing to spit about (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060731/od_nm/mideast_llamas_dc;_ylt=AuV9_WJCVmI1By.5QBfmGbUuQE4 F;_ylu=X3oDMTA3NW1oMDRpBHNlYwM3NTc-). :doh:

If I understand that phrase correctly, you mean it is not. But your country is heading for a major strategical defeat when sticking to air war alone, do Israelis realize this?

[Skybird]

the principle of proportionality, by which Christians are to judge the conduct of a just war,

Quatsch. Proportionate warfare = just war? Quatsch.

Instead of your usual heavily biased and one-sided anti-Israelism, I would like to hear what you have to say on Hezbollah's cynical tactics concerning abusing local resdients as human shields and intentionally wishing to see them being brought to death so that they can score propaganda victories by that. And how to fight them off instead if not by shooting at them. yolu also need to take more into account that the "massacre" at Qana maybe was not committed by Israel, but was triggered and arranged by Hezbollah. what you say on that?

[The Avon Lady]

http://www.theconservativevoice.com/article/16571.html

THE MORAL CULPABILITY FOR QANA

"Everyone in southern Lebanon is a terrorist and is connected to Hezbollah," roared Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon on July 27."Every village from which a Katyusha is fired must be destroyed," bellowed an Israeli general in a quote bannered by the nation's largest newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth.

The Israeli paper then summarized what the justice minister and general were saying: "In other words, a village from which rockets are fired at Israel will simply be destroyed by fire." That was Thursday.

Sunday, in Qana, 57 of Haim Ramon's "terrorists," 37 of them children, were massacred with precision-guided bombs. Apparently, Katyushas had been fired from Qana, near the destroyed building.

"One who goes to sleep with rockets shouldn't be surprised if he doesn't wake up in the morning," said Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman.

Today, we hear unctuous statements about how Israel takes pains to avoid civilian casualties, drops leaflets to warn civilians to flee target areas, and conforms to all the rules of civilized warfare.

But Israel's words and deeds contradict her propaganda. As the war began, Ehud Olmert accused Lebanon, which had condemned Hezbollah for the killing and capture of the Israeli soldiers, of an "act of war." Army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz publicly threatened "to turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years."

Gillerman, at a pro-Israel rally in New York, thundered, "[T]o those countries who claim that we are using disproportionate force, I have only this to say: You're damn right we are."

"His comments drew wild applause," said the Jerusalem Post.

Though Israel is dissembling now, Gillerman spoke the truth then. No sooner had Hezbollah taken the two Israeli soldiers hostage than Israel unleashed an air war -- on Lebanon. The Beirut airport was bombed, its fuel storage tanks set ablaze. The coast was blockaded. Power plants, gas stations, lighthouses, bridges, roads, trucks and buses were all hit with air strikes.

Within 48 hours, it was apparent Israel was exploiting Hezbollah's attack to execute a preconceived military plan to destroy Lebanon -- i.e, the collective punishment of a people and nation for the crimes of a renegade militia they could not control. It was the moral equivalent of a municipal police going berserk, shooting, killing and ravaging an African-American community, because Black Panthers had ambushed and killed cops.

If Israel is not in violation of the principle of proportionality, by which Christians are to judge the conduct of a just war, what can that term mean? There are 600 civilian dead in Lebanon, 19 in Israel, a ratio of 30-1, though Hezbollah is firing unguided rockets, while Israel is using precision-guided munitions.
So?

Boo hoo. :oops:

Do you want me to link to 100 or 200 counter opinion pieces?

Regarding the latest favorite term mumbled by the anti-Israel crowd: 'Disproportionate' in What Moral Universe? (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/27/AR2006072701725.html).

Here's looking at you, kid!

http://img236.imageshack.us/img236/5473/0rr3.jpg

[August]

The enemies of Israel here on this board continually make police analogies in their attempt to cast blame for this incident as if Officer Friendly could somehow defuse the situation and bring love and peace to the region, but they refuse to see that this is not a police operation, this is war, and in war innocent people are sometimes killed.

In any war both sides will cause civilian casualties, but in this one only Hez (or Al Quaeda, the Sunni insurgency, etc - pick your favorite ME conflict) causes them design. First by deliberately attacking completely civilian targets and by surrounding themselves with as many or their own civilian "sandbags" as possible, yet Israel, according to our forum friends, is the party to blame in this conflict, not the terrorists who shoot from behind the skirts of women.

When asked what other choice do the Israelis have there is silence, or misdirection, or ridicule over spelling mistakes, or accusations of not caring enough about innocent people - anything to keep the onus off the Hezbollah thugs who started this war.

I've said it before and i'll say it again. The west, including Israel, has the bombs and troops and military equipment to win this war against Islamic extremists but what it doesn't have is the capability or the will to fight the propaganda war which is as necessary to victory as any munition or elite soldier.

Our very horror at dead women and children is being used against us by our enemies and there is little we will do about it. They know that such scenes will damn us in the eyes of our own people so they deliberately cause as many civilian casualties as possible in the hope that public opinion will hamstring us from finishing the job, and the tactic usually works.

We see it in Lebanon now, just as we've seen it in places like Fajullah, where our efforts at minimizing civilian casualties cause us to forewarn our enemies that we're coming and therefore allow them time to prepare to fight us, and that includes deliberately surrounding themselves with human sandbags.

What we need to realize is that our timid response to such actions actually increase civilian casualties because the war never ends, it just keeps going on, and on, and on, and more and innocent lives are lost.

No surgeons scalpel is so sharp that it doesn't cause pain. We must not let that pain stop us from removing the cancer or it will kill us and civilians will continue to die.

[The Avon Lady]

I learned from the news this morning that now a huge ground offensive has started rolling. Is it another of those expedition-type adventures we have seen in the past, or is this now - finally - the serious and determined operation (whose lack I just was criticising on sunday) to seize the place and then turn every stone in it manually to look what's under it? You probably do not know yourself, but what is your "feeling"?
This new offensive is nothing to spit about (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060731/od_nm/mideast_llamas_dc;_ylt=AuV9_WJCVmI1By.5QBfmGbUuQE4 F;_ylu=X3oDMTA3NW1oMDRpBHNlYwM3NTc-). :doh:

If I understand that phrase correctly, you mean it is not. But your country is heading for a major strategical defeat when sticking to air war alone, do Israelis realize this?
Yes (http://www.opinionjournal.com/wsj/?id=110008733).

Everyone in our circles thought that Olmert had gone about this war wrong from day 1.

There should have been the immediate destruction of all Hizballah targets and the flattening of S. Lebanon without warnings, followed by a much more massive callup of troups. There should have been no house-to-house fighting in Bint J'beil. Troops should have pulled back and the place should have been cratered.

We are fed up with the ridiculous self-imposed "purity of weapons" rules enacted in the IDF by the left, through a leftist professor named Asaf Kasher ages ago.

Yesterday or 2 days ago, our Stalin look-alike defense minister Peretz praised a soldier who witheld fire against a Hizballah terrorist who used a child as a shield while firing an RPG against our soldiers. What kind of lunacy is this? The soldier should be taken out and shot and our Dm should have a double labotomy to increase his IQ.

[Yahoshua]

You subscribe to Women in Green too? :up:

[The Avon Lady]

You subscribe to Women in Green too? :up:
A proud very early member. :rock:

Women in Green (http://www.womeningreen.org/). Poorly designed website.

They are unfortunately not up to the spirit they used to be in during their first decade of activities. That could be attributed to WIG leader Nadia Matar being on the receiving end of numerous police and judicial system harrassments and fabricated trumped up charges during these last few years.

[The Avon Lady]

One more very good article link: The Weaponization of Children (http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/006433.php).

[SUBMAN1]

Good job Avon Lady - good way to put things into a proper perspective.

-S

[Skybird]

I learned from the news this morning that now a huge ground offensive has started rolling. Is it another of those expedition-type adventures we have seen in the past, or is this now - finally - the serious and determined operation (whose lack I just was criticising on sunday) to seize the place and then turn every stone in it manually to look what's under it? You probably do not know yourself, but what is your "feeling"?
This new offensive is nothing to spit about (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060731/od_nm/mideast_llamas_dc;_ylt=AuV9_WJCVmI1By.5QBfmGbUuQE4 F;_ylu=X3oDMTA3NW1oMDRpBHNlYwM3NTc-). :doh:

If I understand that phrase correctly, you mean it is not. But your country is heading for a major strategical defeat when sticking to air war alone, do Israelis realize this?
Yes (http://www.opinionjournal.com/wsj/?id=110008733).

Everyone in our circles thought that Olmert had gone about this war wrong from day 1.

There should have been the immediate destruction of all Hizballah targets and the flattening of S. Lebanon without warnings, followed by a much more massive callup of troups. There should have been no house-to-house fighting in Bint J'beil. Troops should have pulled back and the place should have been cratered.

We are fed up with the ridiculous self-imposed "purity of weapons" rules enacted in the IDF by the left, through a leftist professor named Asaf Kasher ages ago.

Yesterday or 2 days ago, our Stalin look-alike defense minister Peretz praised a soldier who witheld fire against a Hizballah terrorist who used a child as a shield while firing an RPG against our soldiers. What kind of lunacy is this? The soldier should be taken out and shot and our Dm should have a double labotomy to increase his IQ.

I see, and expected that, that both you and me have no illusions about how this war needs to be fought. I totally agree. Flooding the place with troops, I said on weekend, not to fight Hezbollah on the ground, but have so many eyes on the ground that no free space is left to Hezbollah to take a breath (not to mention: moving around) without being monitored - and then striking via air and artillery. After the place has been flattened and wiped out, marching in and turn every stone to see if there is some hidden depot beneath the surface. Do that with all the territory up to the Litani. Takes weeks, without doubt, but if Olmert was not willing to invest weeks, he shouldn'T have started it.

[joea]

37 children killed in just this single IDF incident, while Hezbollah manages to seriously injure one person... hmm... his comments have me imagining Joe Stalin condemning FDR for interring so many Japanese Americans during WWII.

:lol:


I think this remark says it all:

"Clearly, we did not know the civilians were in the way," said IDF spokesman Jacob Dalal, who added that Israel was exercising its right to defend itself with its campaign of airstrikes.
See if you're Lebanese, or any other nationality, and still haven't managed to flee - at your own peril - your country that Israel has destroyed most of the routes out of, well then you're just in the way and so much cannon fodder. This is beginning to resemble more and more another historical parallel but maybe I'll go into that later.

Well all wars are like that sad to say, question was this justifiable and will it achieve the objectives the IDF have set out. I have my doubts personally. :-?

[tycho102]

There should have been the immediate destruction of all Hizballah targets and the flattening of S. Lebanon without warnings, followed by a much more massive callup of troups.

There should have been no house-to-house fighting in Bint J'beil.

Troops should have pulled back and the place should have been cratered.

I utterly agree.

And I have also come to the conclusion that our Tomahawk cluster bombs need to be outfitted with 40,000 ball bearings on each bomblet.

[VipertheSniper]

There should have been the immediate destruction of all Hizballah targets and the flattening of S. Lebanon without warnings, followed by a much more massive callup of troups.

There should have been no house-to-house fighting in Bint J'beil.

Troops should have pulled back and the place should have been cratered.

Sorry but this is ridiculous, you can't win a war with airstrikes alone. Or without losses of your own troops unless you got some unpenetrable armor.

House to house fighting is the only way to go if you don't want to get accused of indiscriminant killing of civilians, whether they were used as human shields or not.

I don't like what the Hezbollah does, they're bloody scum which needs to be disarmed, but just bombing away with no regard for civilian losses is just not right, no matter which side does it.

[The Avon Lady]

I don't like what the Hezbollah does, they're bloody scum which needs to be disarmed, but just bombing away with no regard for civilian losses is just not right, no matter which side does it.
Why so? It was good enough for the Allies against the Nazis.

BTW, I did not mean just airstrikes. I meant do this heavy aerial bombing without scheduling an appointment in advance and then send in the ground troops.

Good night.

[Ducimus]

I don't like what the Hezbollah does, they're bloody scum which needs to be disarmed, but just bombing away with no regard for civilian losses is just not right, no matter which side does it.
Why so? It was good enough for the Allies against the Nazis.

BTW, I did not mean just airstrikes. I meant do this heavy aerial bombing without scheduling an appointment in advance and then send in the ground troops.

Good night.

I was gonna stay out of this but Avon has a point. The United States and Briton carpet bombed the crap out of cities in WW2. French cities, German cities, etc. I beleive that our countries did drop fliers/leaflets that basically said, "get out of town, cause the towns going down!", but we did bomb cities, regardless if anyone was left in them or not.

Edit: Hell, we NUKED japan. We can't really say jack about Isreal bombing civillians regardless of reason without being hipocrites.

[VipertheSniper]

I don't like what the Hezbollah does, they're bloody scum which needs to be disarmed, but just bombing away with no regard for civilian losses is just not right, no matter which side does it.
Why so? It was good enough for the Allies against the Nazis.

BTW, I did not mean just airstrikes. I meant do this heavy aerial bombing without scheduling an appointment in advance and then send in the ground troops.

Good night.

I was gonna stay out of this but Avon has a point. The United States and Briton carpet bombed the crap out of cities in WW2. French cities, German cities, etc. I beleive that our countries did drop fliers/leaflets that basically said, "get out of town, cause the towns going down!", but we did bomb cities, regardless if anyone was left in them or not.


And that makes it right? I mean I'm glad that I don't live under Nazi-rule, but even amongst the Allies it was and still is heavily disputed, if targetting civilians did anything to further their effort.

Apart from that, you're speaking of a war of regular armies against regular armies, here we have regular army against guerrillias.

'Nam any one? regular army facing guerrilia tactics, carpet bombed the hell out of North Vietnam too, did they win? No.

[Skybird]

Sorry but this is ridiculous, you can't win a war with airstrikes alone. Or without losses of your own troops unless you got some unpenetrable armor.

I think that is not what she had on mind, or me. The ground troops are needed for better target identification, to find hideouts and hidden depots, and to reject Hezbollah the free space to move unnoticed, relocating that way, or preparing position, ambushes, etc. When the ground troops spot a target, the target area then is to be flattened by arty and air, with overkill capacity. Rejecting Hezbollah the freedom to move around is what it is about, and fixing them in position until the hammer falls down from the sky.

House to house fighting is the only way to go if you don't want to get accused of indiscriminant killing of civilians, whether they were used as human shields or not.

No. House to house is the bloodiest type of warfare, and any commander with a reasonable mind will try to spare his troops from that. It is the last option. It is enough if the ground troops make enemy identifications and seal the place so that the enemy cannot move to another place until air strike and artillery strike comes in. I do not want so many troops on the ground for house-to-house and man-vs-man fighting, but I want their eyes, and suppressive fire. It is about visual control of as much terrain as possible, to a degree that cannot be done by air recce alone. Unit commanders should not accept to expose their subordinate soldiers to a way of fighting that maximises the risks for their troops because civilians are around. Also, house to house would mean that Israel's army is expected to minimise it's strength (firepower and hi tech, and maximise the fighting advantage for Hezbollah - house to house and man versus man is exactly what Hezbollah wants and were it can play it's ace cards, Hezbollah's weakness and Israel's strength would be neutralised that way, making it a too costly fight for Israel. You do not want it that way, you want it exactly the other way around: maximise Israel's strengths, and minimise Hezbollah's strengths. The destruction of civil infrastructure was for destroying supply lines and possible shelters for Hezbollah. that effort needs to be carried on by having so many eyes on the groiund that every freedom of mobility is rejected to Hezbollah. then find them, get their coordinates, retreat far enough and finally annihilate them from high above.

I don't like what the Hezbollah does, they're bloody scum which needs to be disarmed, but just bombing away with no regard for civilian losses is just not right, no matter which side does it.

Okay, so it is not right. Also, war is not nice, and shooting a gun is not polite, and killing the enemy will not make him your friend. However, these arguments do not get you anywhere. The one who rejects the sword - nevertheless can be killed by a sword. Hurting Hezbollah as badly as possible must be the absolute priority, and the second is to minimise the risks for Israel and Israeli troops. Somewhere between these two, maximising the losses and damage for the enemy are set. Not before these three priorities are met, the interests of civilians are negotiated on a hot battlefield. I agree, that is not fair. But who said that war is fair? The fair one dies in war.

BTW, you will not live long enough to see Hezbollah accepting to be completely disarmed. That is just one of this wishful follies so many people have. When you say "it needs to be disarmed", then draw the consequence from that - accept the use of force. Else accept Hezbollah to stay armed. There is no reasonable and fair solution. Eventually they will accept to give up some old weapons one day in negotiations with the West, under Iranian "pressure", and then the medias without doubt will make a great hype around it and blow the story to galactic proportions and the left will applaud and Europeans will argue that you can reasonably handle Islam and that we need to bow more towards it - and in the hidden Hezbollah rearms again, and continues to fight. You cannot have peace with an enemy whose declared aim it is to kill you and annihilate you by the use of force and who exists only for this very goal.

I also want to point at another level. It is superficial thinking to think that the Arab-Israelis conflict is the biggest conflict in that region. that is of relatively minor importance only, when compared to the very massive conflict between Shias (Iran) and Sunnis (Arab nations). This is what it is about from an Arab perspective, and that is the reason why Arab governments are relatively silent about Israel's actions - in the hidden they support Israels attempt to destroy the spreading influence of Iran in the region that is not wanted and in fact feared by all Arab governments. As long as Israel does not pass a certain line, Arab governments will leave it to occasional words only, but will not try to come into Israel's way, hoping that Iran's legion etranger will be delivered a blow from which it never recovers. it's the orient guys - and here things are not always like they seem to be on the surface. Maybe you consider yourself to be clever when already thinking around two instead of just one corner. but in the Arab sphere you better think around three and four corners. That's what Lawrence never realised.

[Ducimus]

And that makes it right?

I'm not saying its right or wrong. I really don't care either. All im saying, is we (the US) can't sit on the side of "morally right" and look down upon isreal saying, "you can't do that!" We have no place to sit and criticise. We've done far worse then Isreal.

[August]

It might not add much to the discussion but I feel this is one of the best most accurate posts on the subject that i've ever read. Well done Skybird.

Sorry but this is ridiculous, you can't win a war with airstrikes alone. Or without losses of your own troops unless you got some unpenetrable armor.
I think that is not what she had on mind, or me. The ground troops are needed for better target identification, to find hideouts and hidden depots, and to reject Hezbollah the free space to move unnoticed, relocating that way, or preparing position, ambushes, etc. When the ground troops spot a target, the target area then is to be flattened by arty and air, with overkill capacity. Rejecting Hezbollah the freedom to move around is what it is about, and fixing them in position until the hammer falls down from the sky.

House to house fighting is the only way to go if you don't want to get accused of indiscriminant killing of civilians, whether they were used as human shields or not.
No. House to house is the bloodiest type of warfare, and any commander with a reasonable mind will try to spare his troops from that. It is the last option. It is enough if the ground troops make enemy identifications and seal the place so that the enemy cannot move to another place until air strike and artillery strike comes in. I do not want so many troops on the ground for house-to-house and man-vs-man fighting, but I want their eyes, and suppressive fire. It is about visual control of as much terrain as possible, to a degree that cannot be done by air recce alone. Unit commanders should not accept to expose their subordinate soldiers to a way of fighting that maximises the risks for their troops because civilians are around. Also, house to house would mean that Israel's army is expected to minimise it's strength (firepower and hi tech, and maximise the fighting advantage for Hezbollah - house to house and man versus man is exactly what Hezbollah wants and were it can play it's ace cards, Hezbollah's weakness and Israel's strength would be neutralised that way, making it a too costly fight for Israel. You do not want it that way, you want it exactly the other way around: maximise Israel's strengths, and minimise Hezbollah's strengths. The destruction of civil infrastructure was for destroying supply lines and possible shelters for Hezbollah. that effort needs to be carried on by having so many eyes on the groiund that every freedom of mobility is rejected to Hezbollah. then find them, get their coordinates, retreat far enough and finally annihilate them from high above.

I don't like what the Hezbollah does, they're bloody scum which needs to be disarmed, but just bombing away with no regard for civilian losses is just not right, no matter which side does it.
Okay, so it is not right. Also, war is not nice, and shooting a gun is not polite, and killing the enemy will not make him your friend. However, these arguments do not get you anywhere. The one who rejects the sword - nevertheless can be killed by a sword. Hurting Hezbollah as badly as possible must be the absolute priority, and the second is to minimise the risks for Israel and Israeli troops. Somewhere between these two, maximising the losses and damage for the enemy are set. Not before these three priorities are met, the interests of civilians are negotiated on a hot battlefield. I agree, that is not fair. But who said that war is fair? The fair one dies in war.

BTW, you will not live long enough to see Hezbollah accepting to be completely disarmed. That is just one of this wishful follies so many people have. When you say "it needs to be disarmed", then draw the consequence from that - accept the use of force. Else accept Hezbollah to stay armed. There is no reasonable and fair solution. Eventually they will accept to give up some old weapons one day in negotiations with the West, under Iranian "pressure", and then the medias without doubt will make a great hype around it and blow the story to galactic proportions and the left will applaud and Europeans will argue that you can reasonably handle Islam and that we need to bow more towards it - and in the hidden Hezbollah rearms again, and continues to fight. You cannot have peace with an enemy whose declared aim it is to kill you and annihilate you by the use of force and who exists only for this very goal.

I also want to point at another level. It is superficial thinking to think that the Arab-Israelis conflict is the biggest conflict in that region. that is of relatively minor importance only, when compared to the very massive conflict between Shias (Iran) and Sunnis (Arab nations). This is what it is about from an Arab perspective, and that is the reason why Arab governments are relatively silent about Israel's actions - in the hidden they support Israels attempt to destroy the spreading influence of Iran in the region that is not wanted and in fact feared by all Arab governments. As long as Israel does not pass a certain line, Arab governments will leave it to occasional words only, but will not try to come into Israel's way, hoping that Iran's legion etranger will be delivered a blow from which it never recovers. it's the orient guys - and here things are not always like they seem to be on the surface. Maybe you consider yourself to be clever when already thinking around two instead of just one corner. but in the Arab sphere you better think around three and four corners. That's what Lawrence never realised.

[August]

'Nam any one? regular army facing guerrilia tactics, carpet bombed the hell out of North Vietnam too, did they win? No.

As a matter of fact the US Airwar in North Vietnam was very badly conducted and that more than anything else contributed to it's ineffectiveness. Not only were the targets severely restricted but the entire bombing campaign was halted for long periods of time based on political rather than military motives.

Nixon basically used the air war as a political weapon in order to get, and keep the North Vietnamese at the Paris peace talks table. They'd stop off so he'd order a bombing campaign, against targets that hurt, but did not cripple, the NVA. Just enough to get them to return for several more weeks/months of fruitless negotiation.

Unfortunately he did not realize that an on again, off again air war that is being controlled right down to the mission level by politicans 10 thousand miles away from the battlefield is a great recipe for both military and political defeat.

The NVA soon figured how to take advantage of this and would use the time to move more troops and equipment down the Ho Chi Minh trail and haul in more SAM batteries. When they were ready to fight us again they'd storm away from the peace talks, Nixon would respond with a bombing campaign, and our pilots would run into a buzzsaw of prepared air defenses.

Now, had the US Air Force and Navy been allow to do their jobs properly history may well have turned out differently.

[scandium]

I don't like what the Hezbollah does, they're bloody scum which needs to be disarmed, but just bombing away with no regard for civilian losses is just not right, no matter which side does it. Why so? It was good enough for the Allies against the Nazis.

BTW, I did not mean just airstrikes. I meant do this heavy aerial bombing without scheduling an appointment in advance and then send in the ground troops.

Good night.
I was gonna stay out of this but Avon has a point. The United States and Briton carpet bombed the crap out of cities in WW2. French cities, German cities, etc. I beleive that our countries did drop fliers/leaflets that basically said, "get out of town, cause the towns going down!", but we did bomb cities, regardless if anyone was left in them or not.

Edit: Hell, we NUKED japan. We can't really say jack about Isreal bombing civillians regardless of reason without being hipocrites.

Yes we can. At the conclusion of that war were the Nuremburg trials and the new Geneva protocols which placed additional limits on how belligerents can behave in battle or during occupation. The latter placing limits, the former setting the precedent that violating the Geneva Conventions can put you in front of a firing squad or on the gallows.

Also to cite the tactics used in WWII, Geneva Conventions aside, to try and legitimize wanton destruction of Lebanon and its civilian population is just obscene. WWII was a life or death struggle raging all over Europe, Africa, the ME, and the Pacific islands that easily could have gone either way and where millions of soldiers put their lives on the line and lost them.

This, on the other hand, is a conflict involving 2 small countries that began over a border skirmish and where the side you're invoking the WWII precedent on behalf of has take maybe 20 civilian casualties total and about the same number of uniformed military casualties, has not had war declared on them by the country they are reducing to rubble (this country in fact had not authorized the non-state actions in the skirmish that started this, had begged for a cease fire from day 1) and where the unwilling party is completely defenseless.

Israel's actions to date, and the even more heavy handed ones that AL is advocating, amount to little more than state sponsored terror and ethnic cleansing along the very same lines as that which sent Milosevic to the Hague.

If this were being waged against any Western democracy, rather than a ME one that is mainly populated by Arabs, I think the reaction on this forum would be very different. But what's the life of an ordinary Arab worth anyway? Well, by the IDF's calculus and that of its supporters, its worth less than 1/20th of an Israeli one.

[Ducimus]

Yes we can.

Do as i say and not as i do. :D Yes, we're good at that. And if the rules get in the way, our leadership will engage in some fancy legal mumbo jumbo so the rules won't apply.

While it seems like im bashing my own country, im not. I just choose to keep things in perspective and not pretend like we havent done anything like this before. Geniva convention rules changed or not, we've done far worse then kill 60 arab civillians. No change in the conventions that we signed or agreed to will change that. Hell, we've probably killed more civillians by accident in Iraq. Yes i know, how unpatrotic of me to even hint that we don't have the moral highground to speak from :roll:

edit: I forgot to add, so Isreal bombed and killed 60 civilians. You know it's war, **** happends. Its not nice, its not pretty, but it happends. Thats life.

[Skybird]

Yes we can. At the conclusion of that war were the Nuremburg trials and the new Geneva protocols which placed additional limits on how belligerents can behave in battle or during occupation. The latter placing limits, the former setting the precedent that violating the Geneva Conventions can put you in front of a firing squad or on the gallows.

Also to cite the tactics used in WWII, Geneva Conventions aside, to try and legitimize wanton destruction of Lebanon and its civilian population is just obscene. WWII was a life or death struggle raging all over Europe, Africa, the ME, and the Pacific islands that easily could have gone either way and where millions of soldiers put their lives on the line and lost them.

This, on the other hand, is a conflict involving 2 small countries that began over a border skirmish and where the side you're invoking the WWII precedent on behalf of has take maybe 20 civilian casualties total and about the same number of uniformed military casualties, has not had war declared on them by the country they are reducing to rubble (this country in fact had not authorized the non-state actions in the skirmish that started this, had begged for a cease fire from day 1) and where the unwilling party is completely defenseless.

Israel's actions to date, and the even more heavy handed ones that AL is advocating, amount to little more than state sponsored terror and ethnic cleansing along the very same lines as that which sent Milosevic to the Hague.

If this were being waged against any Western democracy, rather than a ME one that is mainly populated by Arabs, I think the reaction on this forum would be very different. But what's the life of an ordinary Arab worth anyway? Well, by the IDF's calculus and that of its supporters, its worth less than 1/20th of an Israeli one.

For Israel it is very much an existential, life-threatening struggle for life or death. That you deny that shows that you have no real idea of how the situation is - from an Israeli perspective, and what the nature and essence of their enemy really is (and I even do not include the Islam problem in this statement).

Do you ever listen to yourself...? Your comments bare any reason, your comparison illustrate the historical understanding of someone for whom reality only is a volume of bureaucratical paragraphs and for whom past world events - are only a toy to arrange them in changing ways and orders, always opportunistacally readjusting them so that they seem to support his queer understanding of what the present is about. Annoying.

[Skybird]

Yes we can.

Do as i say and not as i do. :D Yes, we're good at that. And if the rules get in the way, our leadership will engage in some fancy legal mumbo jumbo so the rules won't apply.

While it seems like im bashing my own country, im not. I just choose to keep things in perspective and not pretend like we havent done anything like this before. Geniva convention rules changed or not, we've done far worse then kill 60 arab civillians. No change in the conventions that we signed or agreed to will change that. Hell, we've probably killed more civillians by accident in Iraq. Yes i know, how unpatrotic of me to even hint that we don't have the moral highground to speak from :roll:

edit: I forgot to add, so Isreal bombed and killed 60 civilians. You know it's war, **** happends. Its not nice, its not pretty, but it happends. Thats life.

And still there is massive and still growing doubt that Hezbollah had no hand in killing these people.

[scandium]

'Nam any one? regular army facing guerrilia tactics, carpet bombed the hell out of North Vietnam too, did they win? No.
As a matter of fact the US Airwar in North Vietnam was very badly conducted and that more than anything else contributed to it's ineffectiveness. Not only were the targets severely restricted but the entire bombing campaign was halted for long periods of time based on political rather than military motives.

Nixon basically used the air war as a political weapon in order to get, and keep the North Vietnamese at the Paris peace talks table. They'd stop off so he'd order a bombing campaign, against targets that hurt, but did not cripple, the NVA. Just enough to get them to return for several more weeks/months of fruitless negotiation.

Unfortunately he did not realize that an on again, off again air war that is being controlled right down to the mission level by politicans 10 thousand miles away from the battlefield is a great recipe for both military and political defeat.

The NVA soon figured how to take advantage of this and would use the time to move more troops and equipment down the Ho Chi Minh trail and haul in more SAM batteries. When they were ready to fight us again they'd storm away from the peace talks, Nixon would respond with a bombing campaign, and our pilots would run into a buzzsaw of prepared air defenses.

Now, had the US Air Force and Navy been allow to do their jobs properly history may well have turned out differently.
Only in that there'd be even more dead Vietnamese and destruction to their country. History has shown, again, and again, and again, that a foreign power, no matter how powerful its conventional military, cannot defeat a determined insurgency. The British learned this during the American Revolution when the colonists revolted and the British could not put the uprising down, with the harder the efforts leading only to a more determined resistance, then they learned it again in what was then Mesopotamia and is now Iraq in the early 20th century and again in what was then Palestine during the British Mandate, the Soviets learned it in Afghanistan, and the French learned this in Vietnam before the U.S. had to learn it themselves only to forget it when GWB came into office.

Insurgents and guerrila armies do not play by the same rules (neither tactically nor strategically) as do legitimate state run conventional militaries, and unlike the latter they do not need to win, they only need not to lose. And that means they only need to suceed in accomplishing one of two things (though in some of the examples above both were accomplished):

1. Last long enough to make it costly enough, in blood and treasure, for the foreign occupier to conclude it is not worth it and pack up and go home;

2. Last long enough to make it costly enough, in blood and treasure, such that the occupier, in increasingly desparate attempts to put down the uprising, becomes increasingly brutal/repressive and World opinion and popular opinion turns against the occupation at home.

#1 and #2 are both reasons why the U.S. will soon declare victory in Iraq and go home, just as they did in Vietnam. The first reason because after 2,500 lives spent and upwards of a trillion dollar nothing has been accomplished there that is in anyway beneficial to the U.S. (other than to certain corporations who are making record profits on it), and therefore at some point rational economics must prevail; the second reason because, whether institutionalized or not, incidents such as those at Fallujah, Haditha, and Abu Ghraib make the U.S. look very bad around the world, and cause more and more people to question whether it is worth it, especially when combined with the costs in blood and treasure versus the return on that investment.

LBJ was blind to this so he was replaced with Nixon, who did understand this (however reluctantly, but he did campain on 'surrender with honour' or whatever he called it and won by a landslide); Bush still doesn't get this with Iraq, but the American people do so after Bush's term is over the U.S. occupation of Iraq will come to an end.

[Torplexed]

I'd be curious to know if Boris Yeltsin will ever be held liable for war crimes in the bombardment and utter destruction of Gronzy. But that happened in an obscure corner of Eurasia and has been pretty much forgotten. Goes to show the lengths a nation will take in it's own self interest regardless of the public-relations hit.


http://online.sfsu.edu/%7Eamkerner/ch/Img/Galleries/Full_size/grozny2-6-00D.Belyakov.jpg

[scandium]

Yes we can.
Do as i say and not as i do. :D Yes, we're good at that. And if the rules get in the way, our leadership will engage in some fancy legal mumbo jumbo so the rules won't apply.

While it seems like im bashing my own country, im not. I just choose to keep things in perspective and not pretend like we havent done anything like this before. Geniva convention rules changed or not, we've done far worse then kill 60 arab civillians. No change in the conventions that we signed or agreed to will change that. Hell, we've probably killed more civillians by accident in Iraq. Yes i know, how unpatrotic of me to even hint that we don't have the moral highground to speak from :roll:

edit: I forgot to add, so Isreal bombed and killed 60 civilians. You know it's war, **** happends. Its not nice, its not pretty, but it happends. Thats life.
Your stance seems based on a neutrality that your government is not taking. Lebanon begged for a cease fire from day 1, Israel refused, saying it needed a couple more weeks to finish destroying Lebanon. The international community - except for the U.S. and Britain, which under Blair has become a U.S. rubber stamp, soon demanded a cease fire as well but the U.S. obstructs it; it has only to say the word and the Israeli bombing and shelling of Lebanon stops, but it refuses so it is not an idle spectator sitting on the fence, but a willing sponsor of Israeli actions and therefore a participant itself just as surely as Syria and Iran sponsor Hezbollah; Israel has also used up so much jet fuel and ordinance that it asked the U.S. for more, and the U.S. is happily putting a rush on that as well.

So there is no 'do as I say not as I do' here, your country is very much involved in this even if its only from the shadows. Further, this is not 'war', this is counter-terrorism gone insane and over the edge. This is the ethnic cleasing of the Arab population of Lebanon through wholesale destruction of its infrastructure, the displacement of a million people who will now have to find refuge somewhere else, and the killing of a few hundred of its civilians for good measure and to send a message.

As to your comment that "**** happens", well people could say the same of 9/11. Why do you suppose some of these people become so fanatical that they'd hijack a plane and fly it into a building or strap on bomb and blow themselves up in a subway? Well you're seeing the motivation as to why they do these things right now (too many here have cause and effect mixed up, and contrary to Subsim myth Islam is the rationalization for Islamic militancy, not the catalyst), because this is not anything new over there, so to use your phrase a lot more **** will be happening and it'll likely again find its way over here soon enough - I wonder if you'll be so nonchalant then?

You call it war, they call it Jihad and the only difference is in how the two sides rationalize the killing of innocent civilians and the tactics they employ to accomplish it. It is madness all of it, and the one only serves to provoke the other, on and on in perpetuity while people shrug - as long as its us or our allies doing the killing - and say '**** happens'. :nope:

I wish I could be so optimistic or so indifferent as to believe there will be no blowback from this. :dead:

[Edit] If anything your rationalization seems to go that because the U.S. had done worse on the all-out life or death global battlefield that was WWII, it is justified in its tacit support and approval of the wholesale destruction being committed in Lebanon, because after WWII the U.S. ratified the new Geneva Protocols, hung those it judged guilty of war crimes at Nuremburg, and has consistently advocated human rights and democracy (which Lebanon is) ever since.

Here's something you may never have seen before, it is from your own declaration of independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

[August]

Only in that there'd be even more dead Vietnamese and destruction to their country. History has shown, again, and again, and again, that a foreign power, no matter how powerful its conventional military, cannot defeat a determined insurgency. The British learned this during the American Revolution when the colonists revolted and the British could not put the uprising down, with the harder the efforts leading only to a more determined resistance, then they learned it again in what was then Mesopotamia and is now Iraq in the early 20th century and again in what was then Palestine during the British Mandate, the Soviets learned it in Afghanistan, and the French learned this in Vietnam before the U.S. had to learn it themselves only to forget it when GWB came into office.

Insurgents and guerrila armies do not play by the same rules (neither tactically nor strategically) as do legitimate state run conventional militaries, and unlike the latter they do not need to win, they only need not to lose. And that means they only need to suceed in accomplishing one of two things (though in some of the examples above both were accomplished):

1. Last long enough to make it costly enough, in blood and treasure, for the foreign occupier to conclude it is not worth it and pack up and go home;

2. Last long enough to make it costly enough, in blood and treasure, such that the occupier, in increasingly desparate attempts to put down the uprising, becomes increasingly brutal/repressive and World opinion and popular opinion turns against the occupation at home.

#1 and #2 are both reasons why the U.S. will soon declare victory in Iraq and go home, just as they did in Vietnam. The first reason because after 2,500 lives spent and upwards of a trillion dollar nothing has been accomplished there that is in anyway beneficial to the U.S. (other than to certain corporations who are making record profits on it), and therefore at some point rational economics must prevail; the second reason because, whether institutionalized or not, incidents such as those at Fallujah, Haditha, and Abu Ghraib make the U.S. look very bad around the world, and cause more and more people to question whether it is worth it, especially when combined with the costs in blood and treasure versus the return on that investment.

LBJ was blind to this so he was replaced with Nixon, who did understand this (however reluctantly, but he did campain on 'surrender with honour' or whatever he called it and won by a landslide); Bush still doesn't get this with Iraq, but the American people do so after Bush's term is over the U.S. occupation of Iraq will come to an end.

Not really. First off it's not true that determined insurgencies have never been defeated. The Confederacy, the MRLA, Boudicca, the Jewish-Roman War and Cyrus the Younger are but a few examples of this.

Secondly you are redefining victory in Iraq. Will the Baathists ever regain power in Iraq? No. Are the Iraqi people being given a chance to build a sustainable nation, free from Saddams oppression? Yes. Besides making registered Republicans out of them i fail to see how anyone could demand that we do more for them. Any nation must eventually stand on it's own or disappear.

What needs to be done is to get over the western worlds foolish idea that wars can, or should be fought with one hand tied behind our backs like some here advocate. Maybe the US, thanks to its location on far distant shores, can afford to cut and run in the Middle East, but the Israelis, with their families living within artillery range and their backs to the Mediterranean cannot.

The overwhelming majority of Americans that i talk to, both online and in person, even here in Democrat controlled southern New England, understand this. So we'll see what happens in 2008. I hope you won't be too disappointed if we manage to actually do some lasting good in the middle east.

[August]

except for the U.S. and Britain, which under Blair has become a U.S. rubber stamp,

Foul. The British are a free people who can and do make their own decisions. Your lefthanded implication that they are forced to take orders from any other nations government is an insult to them and really nothing but a cheap attempt to drive a wedge between one of the strongest and longest lasting alliances in the world.

[Ducimus]

Your stance seems based on a neutrality that your government is not taking.

I was refering to the bombing incident in and of itself, i wasnt talking about the region as a whole. But since your dragging the rest of the muck into it, you wont find me defending Bush's handling of the situation. I feel Bush ****s up by the numbers in alot of global theaters. He has consistantly done so from past to the present. I dont expect any change.

As an aside, if you choose to respond to anything i write, don't make long replies please; i wont read an essay. Short, direct, and to the point if you can.

[scandium]

Your stance seems based on a neutrality that your government is not taking.
I was refering to the bombing incident in and of itself, i wasnt talking about the region as a whole. But since your dragging the rest of the muck into it, you wont find me defending Bush's handling of the situation. I feel Bush ****s up by the numbers in alot of global theaters. He has consistantly done so from past to the present. I dont expect any change.

As an aside, if you choose to respond to anything i write, don't make long replies please; i wont read an essay. Short, direct, and to the point if you can.

Well, you and I are in complete agreement on one thing at least, and I'll see if I can keep any future replies to you quite a lot shorter too. :up:

[Ducimus]

Thanks. I tend to cruise the boards inbetween tasks at work, so the amount of time i devote to reading the forums is breif and sporadic.

[scandium]

Only in that there'd be even more dead Vietnamese and destruction to their country. History has shown, again, and again, and again, that a foreign power, no matter how powerful its conventional military, cannot defeat a determined insurgency. The British learned this during the American Revolution when the colonists revolted and the British could not put the uprising down, with the harder the efforts leading only to a more determined resistance, then they learned it again in what was then Mesopotamia and is now Iraq in the early 20th century and again in what was then Palestine during the British Mandate, the Soviets learned it in Afghanistan, and the French learned this in Vietnam before the U.S. had to learn it themselves only to forget it when GWB came into office.

Insurgents and guerrila armies do not play by the same rules (neither tactically nor strategically) as do legitimate state run conventional militaries, and unlike the latter they do not need to win, they only need not to lose. And that means they only need to suceed in accomplishing one of two things (though in some of the examples above both were accomplished):

1. Last long enough to make it costly enough, in blood and treasure, for the foreign occupier to conclude it is not worth it and pack up and go home;

2. Last long enough to make it costly enough, in blood and treasure, such that the occupier, in increasingly desparate attempts to put down the uprising, becomes increasingly brutal/repressive and World opinion and popular opinion turns against the occupation at home.

#1 and #2 are both reasons why the U.S. will soon declare victory in Iraq and go home, just as they did in Vietnam. The first reason because after 2,500 lives spent and upwards of a trillion dollar nothing has been accomplished there that is in anyway beneficial to the U.S. (other than to certain corporations who are making record profits on it), and therefore at some point rational economics must prevail; the second reason because, whether institutionalized or not, incidents such as those at Fallujah, Haditha, and Abu Ghraib make the U.S. look very bad around the world, and cause more and more people to question whether it is worth it, especially when combined with the costs in blood and treasure versus the return on that investment.

LBJ was blind to this so he was replaced with Nixon, who did understand this (however reluctantly, but he did campain on 'surrender with honour' or whatever he called it and won by a landslide); Bush still doesn't get this with Iraq, but the American people do so after Bush's term is over the U.S. occupation of Iraq will come to an end.
Not really. First off it's not true that determined insurgencies have never been defeated. The Confederacy, the MRLA, Boudicca, the Jewish-Roman War and Cyrus the Younger are but a few examples of this.
Yeah you're right, I overstated my point and should have said simply that unlike a conventional occupying force, an insurgency doesn't need to fight to win, it only needs to last long enough not to lose. BTW the Confederacy is not a good example of the irregular, geurrila style forces we're discussing such as with regard to Vietnam or Iraq, since the Confederacy employed all of the standard traditions, methods, tactics and strategies of conventional forces of the day and of their Union enemy and were beaten on the battlefield in the same manner that conventional wars are usually decided - but which is anathema to guerilla armies which, first and foremost, seek to avoid any of the pitched battles that were the hallmark of the US civil war.

Secondly you are redefining victory in Iraq. Will the Baathists ever regain power in Iraq? No. Are the Iraqi people being given a chance to build a sustainable nation, free from Saddams oppression? Yes. Besides making registered Republicans out of them i fail to see how anyone could demand that we do more for them. Any nation must eventually stand on it's own or disappear. Am I? How am I defining victory in Iraq and what is your definition of victory in Iraq? If your definition of victory in Iraq is the removal of Saddam from power, then why is the US still there in similar numbers 3 years later? If that is your definition of victory then it appears to be at odds with your government's, since your military is still there in the same numbers and still taking casualties - and for what end? I'm not asking that rhetorically by the way, I honestly don't know the answer.

What needs to be done is to get over the western worlds foolish idea that wars can, or should be fought with one hand tied behind our backs like some here advocate. Maybe the US, thanks to its location on far distant shores, can afford to cut and run in the Middle East, but the Israelis, with their families living within artillery range and their backs to the Mediterranean cannot. Because you are the first to demand that anyone who is critical of the situation there post a solution, I am going to hold you here to your own standard: what exactly do you advocate doing differently; and I'm talking stragegy and tactics now, the stuff I suspect that we - as do the many other here - have a common interest in, even when we disagree on the specific politics involved.

The overwhelming majority of Americans that i talk to, both online and in person, even here in Democrat controlled southern New England, understand this. So we'll see what happens in 2008. I hope you won't be too disappointed if we manage to actually do some lasting good in the middle east.
This will come as a total shock to you, but no matter who wins in '08, if they can accomplish any change for the better and/or any peace in the ME then I will be among the first here to applaud them for doing so. And you can hold me to that too.

[scandium]

except for the U.S. and Britain, which under Blair has become a U.S. rubber stamp,
Foul. The British are a free people who can and do make their own decisions. Your lefthanded implication that they are forced to take orders from any other nations government is an insult to them and really nothing but a cheap attempt to drive a wedge between one of the strongest and longest lasting alliances in the world.
Let's briefly revisit a moment in history:

Feb. 11/03, 6 weeks before "Shock and Awe"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2747175.stm

In the UK, an opinion poll in the Times newspaper this week found that 51% of those questioned saw Tony Blair as a US poodle - although 47% trusted him to do the right thing. An overwhelming 86% wanted more time for weapons inspections, and only 25% thought enough evidence had been found to justify a war.

[August]

Yeah you're right, I overstated my point and should have said simply that unlike a conventional occupying force, an insurgency doesn't need to fight to win, it only needs to last long enough not to lose.

I can agree with that.

BTW the Confederacy is not a good example of the irregular, geurrila style forces we're discussing such as with regard to Vietnam or Iraq, since the Confederacy employed all of the standard traditions, methods, tactics and strategies of conventional forces of the day and of their Union enemy and were beaten on the battlefield in the same manner that conventional wars are usually decided - but which is anathema to guerilla armies which, first and foremost, seek to avoid any of the pitched battles that were the hallmark of the US civil war.

This is true, but i thought it was worth mentioning because the Confederacy did have it's guerrilla units both during the war and those that fought on after the surrender at Appromatox. The last battle of the war was actually fought in Texas i believe and of course there is the Lincoln assassins and the klu klux clan, both of which would fit the description of insurgents, at least for the times.

The key i think, in both that war and the present one in Iraq is how marginalized the insurgency becomes among their own people. At some point the people of the south decided to get on with their lives. I'm hoping that the Iraqi people make the same choice and i think a growing majority of them already have. There are however outside influences at work which are complicating the process.

Am I? How am I defining victory in Iraq and what is your definition of victory in Iraq? If your definition of victory in Iraq is the removal of Saddam from power, then why is the US still there in similar numbers 3 years later? If that is your definition of victory then it appears to be at odds with your government's, since your military is still there in the same numbers and still taking casualties - and for what end? I'm not asking that rhetorically by the way, I honestly don't know the answer.

What i honestly think we've been doing these past three years is trying to apply similar preventative post war measures to ensure stability like what we did in Germany and Japan after WW2. I guess truth be told, whether it will work or not remains to be seen, but the alternative would have been walk out after Saddam went underground and to leave a total vacuum which would have been totally unacceptable.

Because you are the first to demand that anyone who is critical of the situation there post a solution, I am going to hold you here to your own standard: what exactly do you advocate doing differently; and I'm talking stragegy and tactics now, the stuff I suspect that we - as do the many other here - have a common interest in, even when we disagree on the specific politics involved.

In the Israeli Hezbollah war or the US post war reconstruction efforts in Iraq?

If it's the first one, then i would do like Skybird and Avon Lady say and go full out against Hezbollah, at least unless and until the UN commits enough troops to actually secure Israels northern border.

If it's the latter, then at this point I say we should stay the course in Iraq. Continue to build up the Iraqi government, military and police forces for a few more years at least. Whether one agrees with the Iraq war or not, at this point I feel we owe it to the Iraqis to make damn sure we have tried our best to leave them in better shape than they were under Saddam before we leave.

This will come as a total shock to you, but no matter who wins in '08, if they can accomplish any change for the better and/or any peace in the ME then I will be among the first here to applaud them for doing so. And you can hold me to that too.

Well if it happens I seriously doubt i would need to hold you to it Scandium. For all our disagreements i don't think you are that type of guy.

There are others however, including some of my fellow countrymen, that i would though. I believe that negativity, regardless of accuracy or motivation is amplified far more than the positive in this modern era of mass world communications and that it has an increased effect on both our own and our enemies will to continue. I often wonder if we could have won the war against the Germans and Japanese or any war for that matter if those negative voices were heard as loudly then as they are today.

[August]

except for the U.S. and Britain, which under Blair has become a U.S. rubber stamp,
Foul. The British are a free people who can and do make their own decisions. Your lefthanded implication that they are forced to take orders from any other nations government is an insult to them and really nothing but a cheap attempt to drive a wedge between one of the strongest and longest lasting alliances in the world.
Let's briefly revisit a moment in history:

Feb. 11/03, 6 weeks before "Shock and Awe"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2747175.stm

In the UK, an opinion poll in the Times newspaper this week found that 51% of those questioned saw Tony Blair as a US poodle - although 47% trusted him to do the right thing. An overwhelming 86% wanted more time for weapons inspections, and only 25% thought enough evidence had been found to justify a war.

Well regardless of what that poll suggests, and sorry, either he's a poodle of a foreign power or he'll do the right thing (by Britain I assume), he cannot be both, I think a better barometer of true English public opinion is the fact that they have allowed PM Blair to remain in power for nearly three years since that poll was taken.

[Skybird]

Israel refused, saying it needed a couple more weeks to finish destroying Lebanon. No, that is a distortion, they said they need some weeks to destroy not Lebanon, but strongholds and positions of Hezbollah, and not throughout the country, but in the south. They also said that there probably will never peace in the region as long Hezbollah remains armed. But I am sure that you know damn well what they said and just tried to get a cheap shot off the hip. As so very often.

As to your comment that "**** happens", well people could say the same of 9/11. Why do you suppose some of these people become so fanatical that they'd hijack a plane and fly it into a building or strap on bomb and blow themselves up in a subway?
Tell us. In case you say that it is because the West is so very unjust and unfair, then this obviously already was the case in the 7th century. Since then the faith they represent, reaches out at other cultures, attacks and subjugates them, and tries to destroy every religion and culture whose territories it had conquered. The terrorists of 9/11 not only struck for political reasons, but also for religious ones. A simple fact that people often try to ignore.

and no matter why a terrorist became a terrorist - a terror strike always remains to be just that - a terror strike.

[Skybird]

Some interesting finding:

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/07/milking-it.html
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/08/game-set-and-match.html

[scandium]

Israel refused, saying it needed a couple more weeks to finish destroying Lebanon. No, that is a distortion, they said they need some weeks to destroy not Lebanon, but strongholds and positions of Hezbollah, and not throughout the country, but in the south.
Uh huh.

BBC has a nice day by day chronicle of events, let's contrast your claim with these direct, factual events taken word for word from their website.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5179434.stm

July 13,

After a night of Israeli air raids across southern Lebanon, Israeli jets strike the runways at Beirut's international airport in the morning, forcing the airport to close. Reports emerge of significant numbers of civilian casualties in Lebanese towns and villages close to Israeli targets, with at least 35 people reported killed.


July 14,

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah promises "open war" against Israel after his offices in Beirut are bombed.

The strikes are part of Israel's ongoing operation against targets across Lebanon.

Bridges, roads and fuel depots are hit, with new strikes against Beirut airport. The number of Lebanese civilians killed in the strikes rises above 50, and the crisis continues to concern international powers.


July 15,

Israel expands its strikes in Lebanon, attacking a large number of targets including, for the first time, the northern port city of Tripoli.

Eighteen Lebanese fleeing a village are killed when their vehicles are struck with missiles on the road to the southern city of Tyre.


July 16,

Israeli air-raids kill at least 23 people in southern Lebanon, including 16 in the city of Tyre. Seven Canadians of Lebanese origin are killed in a village about 33 miles (50 kilometres) south of Beirut while on a family holiday.


July 17,

Israel extends its air strikes to the north, killing at least 15 people in and around Tripoli, Lebanon's second-largest city.

Other targets include the nearby port of Abdeh - where nine Lebanese soldiers die - the capital, Beirut, and the eastern city of Baalbek.

Ten people are reportedly killed driving across a bridge south of Beirut as Israeli missiles strike.

The international community steps up its evacuation of foreigners from Beirut, as thousands of Lebanese flee their homes.


July 18,

Eleven Lebanese soldiers die under air attack in the east of Beirut, while six bodies are pulled from the rubble of a building in the town of Aitaroun.


The number of Lebanese killed since the start of Israel's offensive reaches about 230, with 25 Israelis also killed.

The UN warns of a humanitarian disaster as Lebanese flee their homes, with air strikes on roads and bridges hampering efforts to help them.


July 19,

As Israeli forces bomb Lebanon for an eighth day, Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora appeals for an immediate end to the Israeli attacks on his country, saying more than 300 people had been killed by the Israeli air raids so far, with 1,000 wounded and 500,000 displaced.


July 20,

Israel continues its bombing of Lebanon, carrying out 80 air strikes.

The death toll reaches at least 306 people in Lebanon and 31 in Israel.


July 21,

Israel masses soldiers and tanks on the Lebanese border, called up thousands of reserves, drops leaflets on parts of southern Lebanon urging residents to leave.

It maintains its bombardment of the country, hitting more than 40 targets, mainly in southern Beirut.

Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora says the offensive is now no longer against Hezbollah, but against Lebanon.


July 22,

Troops continue to line up along Israel's northern border, but Israel says it is not planning a full-scale ground invasion.

Humanitarian concerns mount as thousands of Lebanese try to flee southern Lebanon. The UN pushes for secure routes for civilians to escape and much-needed aid to be delivered.

Israel targets Lebanese phone and television masts in air strikes, while Hezbollah fires dozens of rockets into Israel.

The death toll rises to at least 350 Lebanese and 34 Israelis.


July 23,

Israeli strikes hit southern Beirut, the Bekaa valley, Tyre, and - for the first time - Sidon, a southern port city ull of refugees from the surrounding countryside. There are no confirmed reports on the number of Lebanese casualties.

The UN's emergency relief co-ordinator, Jan Egeland, is shocked by the ruins he finds as he tours southern districts of Beirut. He says the large scale of the destruction, and its indiscriminate nature, renders it a violation of humanitarian law.


July 24,

UK PM Tony Blair says the situation in Lebanon is "a catastrophe", while UN Secretary General Kofi Annan says international ministerial talks in Rome on Wednesday must not fail.


July 25,

Israel resumes air raids on Beirut.

Late in the day, an Israeli air strike kills four UN observers at their post in the southern Lebanese town of Khiam. The UN had already repeatedly warned the Israelis that their artillery bombardment was endangering the UN post.


July 26,

An initial UN report into the deaths of four UN observers says the UN repeatedly urged Israel to stop firing in the area around its post before a rocket landed on the site. Israel describes the event as a "tragic mistake".


July 27,

Israel says the decision in Rome not to call for an immediate ceasefire indicates backing from world powers for the offensive to continue.


July 28,

A US state department spokesman dismisses an Israeli suggestion that it has the world's authorisation to continue bombing Lebanon as "outrageous", insisting the US is doing all it can to bring an end to the conflict.

The UN calls for a 72-hour truce in the conflict zone to allow humanitarian aid in and to get casualties out.

Israel carries out dozens of fresh strikes on Lebanon. Lebanese officials say at least 12 people are killed.


July 29,

A separate Israeli strike wounds two UN monitors in their observation post, the UN says, days after four were killed.

This follows a warning by the UN that the killing of its observers on Tuesday may deter countries from contributing to a future peacekeeping force.

The UN says children, the elderly and disabled people have been left stranded and supplies are "running out very, very fast" in southern Lebanon and calls for a three-day truce to let aid in.

But an Israeli government spokesman says there is no need for a temporary ceasefire because Israel has opened a humanitarian corridor to and from Lebanon.


July 30,

An Israeli air strike kills more than 54 Lebanese civilians, at least 34 of them children, in the southern village of Qana in the bloodiest single attack of the conflict.


July 31,

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says Israel will not declare a ceasefire "in the coming days". He apologises to the Lebanese people "for the pain caused", and says Israel's fight is against Hezbollah, not Lebanon.


August 1,

Six aid convoys - two from the World Food Programme and four carrying International Committee of the Red Cross supplies - are unable to leave for affected areas in the absence of safe passage guarantees. Israeli PM Ehud Olmert says Israel is "winning" the battle against Hezbollah.

------------

This is not "war". This is ethnic cleansing and state sponsored terrorism being waged by the IDF & IAF at the behest of the rookie Israeli leadership who, which is rare in Israel, has no personal experience themselves with battle and a need to prove that they can be "tough on terror" by destroying small, defenceless, democratic Lebanon. They are fools and 4 million people are paying the price for their wounded pride.

[Rockstar]

If Israel demands and conditions are not met I hope the stone sinks deep into the forehead, let them turn Lebenon into into a sandbox.

[Skybird]

scandium,

You can't mean that list-thing serious.

Is that list your argument to defend your wrong claims? What is it good for? What has it to do with your previous suggestive claims about what Israel said it wants to do? what have Blair and Annan to do with it, not to mention the UN? Where was it ever said that Israel wants to destroy all Lebanon? They could do it, but they don't - why, if that is their intention? Where is your support for your suggestive statement that Israel said it wants to destroy all Lebanon?

You got trapped in oyur own verbal trap and now try to sneak out of it.

You really ignore everything that does not support your view, and that behavior is nervekilling for others that do care about the issue. I have written more, but deleted it again - who cares what unrealistic thoughts are going on inside your mind. you have a realistic recipe to decrease the threat from Hezbollah? Hezbollah, that has murdered 1100 civilians in Israel over the last five years in the name of complete annihilation of Israel, in the name of Islam (unobjected by global Muslim community), and in the name of those Lebanese people it now leads as lambs to the slaughterbank, and that get killed by turning them into human shields for it's rocket launchers and provoking them to get struck when going for the weapons of Hezbollah? Your are so superior, so high on your moral horse. You have a realistic, practical alternative how to deal with this bloodthirsty scum? No? I read the manual, and it says: press the off-button.

***Edited cause Gizzmoe wanted it.***

[PeriscopeDepth]

The same people arguing the same things never gets old. Arguing on internet forums is like throwing yourself against a brick wall.

Alright, carry on...

PD

[Ducimus]

The same people arguing the same things never gets old. Arguing on internet forums is like throwing yourself against a brick wall.

Alright, carry on...

PD

Too much free time, and/or extremly bored i think. If i step into argument, those are my two primary reasons. There are times when one has better things to do, then argue with people you don't even know, about crappy subjects that have no bearing on your day to day existance whatsoever. :rotfl:

[scandium]

scandium,

You can't mean that list-thing serious.

Yup, it was a direct refutation of your arguement citing events chronologued by one of the more reputable news organizations.

Hezbollah, that has murdered 1100 civilians in Israel over the last five years in the name of complete annihilation of Israel

You keep repeating this number so often, followed by a slew of rhetoric that its used to bolster, that I'm going to call you on it now. Post a source for the '1100 civilians murdered in Israel over the last five years by Hezbollah' statement you keep repeating, and feel free to use any unbiased mainstream news source you like for the 1100 civilian figures.

[STEED]

The same people arguing the same things never gets old. Arguing on internet forums is like throwing yourself against a brick wall.

Alright, carry on...

PD

Too much free time, and/or extremly bored i think. If i step into argument, those are my two primary reasons. There are times when one has better things to do, then argue with people you don't even know, about crappy subjects that have no bearing on your day to day existance whatsoever. :rotfl:

I will drink to that.:up: :()1:

[Takeda Shingen]

I'd be curious to know if Boris Yeltsin will ever be held liable for war crimes in the bombardment and utter destruction of Gronzy. But that happened in an obscure corner of Eurasia and has been pretty much forgotten. Goes to show the lengths a nation will take in it's own self interest regardless of the public-relations hit.

Yet we looked the other way. Yeltsin was our bad guy of the day, and US doctrine held that a democratic Russia was more important than anything. As I understand it, this was a smashing success.

[Skybird]

scandium: Israel refused, saying it needed a couple more weeks to finish destroying Lebanon.

Skybird: No, that is a distortion, they said they need some weeks to destroy not Lebanon, but strongholds and positions of Hezbollah, and not throughout the country, but in the south.

Scandium: a list with excerpts from recent events in the warzone that is both subjeczive and most items on it are unchecked

Skybird: You can't mean that list-thing serious. Is that list your argument to defend your wrong claims? What is it good for? What has it to do with your previous suggestive claims about what Israel said it wants to do? etc. etc.

Scandium: Yup, it was a direct refutation of your arguement citing events chronologued by one of the more reputable news organizations.

-----

It started with your argument, not mine - I had none except that your argument simply is wrong. Noone said what you wanted him to have said.

[Skybird]

concerning the number of murdervictims on Israeli side, I do not take the time to google all newswebsites were I eventually red it, jujst to do you a favour, and you will ignore all that you do not like anyway, as usual, but I came across several such references, I have it in one political book published in spring this year as well, and so I go the easy way and simply quote wikipedia that I just checked:

The death toll both military and civilians of the entire conflict in 2000-2006 is estimated to be 3,651 Palestinians and 1007 Israelis,[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Aqsa_Intifada#_note-0) although this number is criticized by IDF sources for not differentiating between combatants and civilians.[2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Aqsa_Intifada#_note-1)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Aqsa_Intifada

The numbers I remember vary between 1050 and 1200 civilians killed on Israeli side. the 1008 wikipedia mentions fits in that scale, roughly. And those Israeli victims I consider to be the victims of first strikes, where as the casualties on Palestinian side were cause by reaction to those murderish events.

[scandium]

The death toll both military and civilians of the entire conflict in 2000-2006 is estimated to be 3,651 Palestinians and 1007 Israelis,[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Aqsa_Intifada#_note-0) although this number is criticized by IDF sources for not differentiating between combatants and civilians.[2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Aqsa_Intifada#_note-1)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Aqsa_Intifada

The numbers I remember vary between 1050 and 1200 civilians killed on Israeli side. the 1008 wikipedia mentions fits in that scale, roughly. And those Israeli victims I consider to be the victims of first strikes, where as the casualties on Palestinian side were cause by reaction to those murderish events.
Perhaps you should stick to your usual metaphysical diatribes about Islam, Muhammed, and how the Muslim's of the world are conspiring to conquer and enslave us, since you don't seem so good with facts and figures; This 1,100 number you mentioned numerous times to kind of, what, catapult the propaganda? repeat the same lie often enough and it becomes truth? I'm just asking because you've pulled it out of thin air and repeat it over, and over, and over again.

By the way I am trying not to be uncivil toward you, but it really irks me that this 1,100 number you repeated over and over is not only completely fictitious, but in all of your many posts about the related crimes committed by Hezbollah to justify the barbaric measures you advocate Israel take as a response, you now reveal that you don't even seem to know what Hezbollah is. Here's some info for you:

Al-Aqsa, which you link to, is the name given to the Palestinian Intifada; Hezbollah, on the other hand, is a distinct guerilla organization (numbering perhaps 5,000 members total - terrifying isn't it?) founded in the '80s, in Lebanon, and funded by Iran and supported by Iran, with the group's aim being to kick Israel and its IDF out of southern Lebanon. Here's another fact you probably didn't know (though you would be far from alone in this, as its somewhat an obscure fact): only 3 countries in the world officially consider Hezbollah a terrorist organization: the U.S., Canada, and Israel. In most of the rest of the world its regarded as a resistance movement, and in some parts of the world a legitimate one as well.

As to the actual number of Israeli civilians killed by Hezbollah since Israel's withdrawl from Lebanon in 2000 and up until hostilities flared up this month, I could fine one single killing of an Israeli civillian (a 16 year old Israeli victim of a Hezbollah shelling attack), but again since I didn't use the 1,100 number repeatedly its up to you, still, to back up that figure.

In the meantime, if you're going to bring the Palestinians into this, then fine, here are the statistics as recorded by the Israeli Human Rights Group B'Tselem:

Palestinians killed by Israelis: 3,651
Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians: 695
Israeli security force personnel killed by Palestinians: 311

Palestinian minors killed by Israeli security forces: 724
Israeli minors killed by Palestinians: 119

And that doesn't even begin to touch on the "administrative detentions", thousands of houses demolished by the IDF, land expropriations, deportations, revocations of residency, unemployment and poverty, curfews, or the water crisis that these occupied people live under. But its all metaphysical to you anyway so what is the point in bringing up numbers and facts. To me its all madness and I wish I could simply blame everything on some guy who lived in the 7th century the way you do over, and, and over again, and let it go at that.

http://www.btselem.org/English/

[Spoon 11th]

Is this laser thingy (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2407807.stm) being deployed at the moment?

[Skybird]

the numbers I read and know are different. those 1050-1200 in several sources are described as purely civilian - victims of terror and murder in Israel since the beginning of the second intifada, that was in autumn 2000. nothing else I ever have said. Excluding losses in combat action of retaliation, while others say they include military losses. Military losses that would not be there if terrorists would not attack Israel time and again. This number irks you? And why I tell you that again and again? Because you constantly ignore it and behave as if Israel is acting unprovoked, and has not been attacked first, since years, again and again and again and again and again. Want to know what irks me? that you constantly declare an attacker the victim, that you do not differ terrorism from guerilla and/or a cause of just defense, and that you exclusively yell for the deaths of one side (ignoring all the doubts and critical questions that needs to be asked abiut much of the propaganda pictures there are, I just liniked some of these in this thread), that you remain totally silent about the year-long dying of the other side, and that it is living under constant attacks since years, and that you leave out that the Palestinians have time and again refused all deals and offers that had been offered to them in the past 15 years. And you list "the administrative detentions, thousands of houses demolished by the IDF, land expropriations, deportations, revocations of residency, unemployment and poverty, curfews, or the water crisis that these occupied people live under.", as if there is no reason at all why the Israeli take measures against a people that holds an extremely aggressive attitude towards them, openly demand the annihilation of Israel, supported Saddam and Hezbollah, tried to overcome Jordan, and founded Hamas and rejected every deal in the past and voted for a corrupt Arafat clan to rule them and voted for the Hamas to claim government. And that you do not have any reasonable, functioning, realistic alternative to offer doesn't make you postings any more attractive. concerning your illusory picture of Islam as being a religion of peace and tolerance, I leave you alone, and simply work as best against Islam as I can. Because if people like you will decide that issue, the Western tradition in europe will be another one in a long chain of cultures that had been completely or almost completey wiped out by Islam in the past 1500 years. It is record-holder in this sports, you know. It is demanded in their holy scirptures to do so. But you probably know their scriptures better than they themselves.Sure, I do not share your illusions, and I have learned that the world does not change simply because I wish it would be different. No wonder that you call me metaphysical. It surely is the right guy telling me that. :lol:Aand just to be clear about one thing that you also constantly ignore: it does not have any meaning if the world agrees or not, an organisation that blows up school busses, tries to intentionally kill as many civilians as possible, put civilians of a hosting nation into harms way and use them as human shields, raises hospitals over ammo dumps and puts missile launchers on top of schools, is no resitance organization, but a terror organisation. It is not made up of guerillas, but of terrorists and criminals. But in your formulas and paper definitions and oh so valuable treaty papers and UN terms, that difference probably is not important. In the end it comes down to simply this: by your arguing, thinking and maybe even doing you actively suppoort and assist the interests of goals of e terror front. Your motives and what you wish and hope and pray for is not the important thing, but the outcome in practical reality. And by those consequences and effects you are judged, by me, and by others on this board, and in your real life as well. So do not wonder that you raise conflicts here.

[August]

Palestinians killed by Israelis: 3,651
Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians: 695
Israeli security force personnel killed by Palestinians: 311

Palestinian minors killed by Israeli security forces: 724
Israeli minors killed by Palestinians: 119

Unfortunately those numbers you cite are flawed, Scandium.

A glaring omission, like many of the various casualty tallies coming out of the middle east, is the numbers of Arab fighters killed. I imagine they're included in the 3,651 figure but why are they never individually categorized like the Israeli numbers are?

For all we know a great majority of that number were actually fighters, even some of the Palistinian minors, and thus legitimate war targets. Depending on the true percentages, it could give those tallies an entirely new meaning.

Same thing with the Lebanese casualty numbers in the present campaign. How many are Hez and how many innocent civilians caught in the crossfire? Unless we know how can we judge the true situation over there?

[Skybird]

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/08/02/1154198198226.html

Govt, Muslim advisers clash on Hizbollah

August 2, 2006 - 6:19PM

The government is on a collision course with its Muslim advisory group over its claim that Hizbollah should not be considered a terrorist organisation.
The Muslim Community Reference Group is considering writing to Prime Minister John Howard asking the government to reconsider its listing of the militant arm of Hizbollah as a terrorist organisation.
The group is meeting Thursday and will decide whether to put the demand to Mr Howard.
But any call for the government to change its position on Hizbollah, which has been engaged in open warfare with Israel for the past three weeks, would appear to be futile.
Mr Howard made it clear Wednesday the government had no intention of removing the militant arm of Hizbollah from its official list of terrorist organisations.
"No chance, full stop. No chance at all (of removing Hizbollah from the list)," Mr Howard told reporters.
Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said the decision to ban Hizbollah, which was first listed in 2003, had not been made lightly.
"They're not decisions which are political," he said.
However, the government would be willing to consider new information which may cause it to reassess the listing.
"Obviously we look at these issues from time to time to see whether circumstances change," Mr Ruddock said.
"I'm not aware of any information that would suggest we should reconsider proscription of the military wing of Hizbollah."
But Ameer Ali, chairman of the Muslim advisory group set up last year in the wake of the London terrorist bombings, says Hizbollah should not be lumped in with groups like al-Qaeda.
"They should not condemn Hizbollah as a terrorist group," he told AAP.
"I don't think they should judge that they are simply a terrorist organisation like al-Qaeda.
"It is part of Lebanese politics."
On its national security website, the government says that Australian Security Intelligence Organisation believes Hizbollah's military wing is continuing to prepare, plan and foster the commission of acts involving threats to human life and serious damage to property.
"Such acts include those made with the intention of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause and with the intention of coercing or influencing by intimidation, US, Israeli and other Western governments."
Dr Ali believes the government's assessment of Hizbollah is clouded by the US and Israel.
"We are of the opinion that the Australian government does not have an independent foreign policy with regard to the Middle East," he told ABC Radio.
"We go along with whatever the Americans say and the Americans go along with whatever the Israeli lobby says."

"It is part of Lebanese politics."

Yes indeed. It sits with two or three ministres in the cabinet. That's why Lebanon is held responsible.

[Skybird]

Primitive propaganda for terrorism and intentionally killing civilians - not evemn well-designed, nervertheless with slogans that remind me of the propaganda movies during the Third Reich.

http://www.pmw.org.il/asx/PMW_Manar_Propoganda.asx

Show me comparable footage from the Israeli government or the IDF.

[scandium]

Primitive propaganda for terrorism and intentionally killing civilians - not evemn well-designed, nervertheless with slogans that remind me of the propaganda movies during the Third Reich.

http://www.pmw.org.il/asx/PMW_Manar_Propoganda.asx

Show me comparable footage from the Israeli government or the IDF.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/get-out-israel-warns/2006/08/02/1154198168749.html

Meanwhile, Israel today hacked into the television station of Hezbollah, emblazoning images on the screen showing pictures of corpses and claiming the Shi'ite militant group's leader Hassan Nasrallah was a liar.

One of the images shown on Al-Manar television portrayed the body of a fighter lying face-down, wearing khaki trousers with a text beneath in Arabic reading: "This is the photograph of a body of a member of Hezbollah's special forces."

"Nasrallah lies: it is not us that is hiding our losses," continued the text, which appeared during the evening news and stayed on the screen for several minutes.
A photograph of Nasrallah himself also appeared with the legend: "Member of Hezbollah: watch out".

Another photograph of corpses was framed by the words: "There are a large number of corpses like this on the ground and Nasrallah is hiding this truth".
[Edit] And then there's this:

http://www.nysun.com/article/37140

HAIFA, Israel — Viewers of Hezbollah TV are getting some unexpected interruptions — courtesy of their enemy.

In the middle of newscasts and programming from Hezbollah's Al-Manar station, Israeli technicians are hacking the signal and replacing it with a 90-second spot that begins with a gun site superimposed on a crude drawing of Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, looking at the ground.

The image is punctuated by the sound of three gunshots and framed on the top with the words, "Your day is coming, coming, coming." On the bottom of the image of Sheik Nasrallah are the words: "The state of Israel." For the next 90 seconds, the message is clear: Give up. Resistance is futile.

The special broadcast to Al-Manar's audience from Israel is the latest salvo in the Jewish state's propaganda war against the Iranian-backed terror militia after Israel's military managed to hack into the satellite feed of the station over the weekend.

We are borg. Resistance is futile. You will be assassinated.

[scandium]

Palestinians killed by Israelis: 3,651
Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians: 695
Israeli security force personnel killed by Palestinians: 311

Palestinian minors killed by Israeli security forces: 724
Israeli minors killed by Palestinians: 119
Unfortunately those numbers you cite are flawed, Scandium.

A glaring omission, like many of the various casualty tallies coming out of the middle east, is the numbers of Arab fighters killed. I imagine they're included in the 3,651 figure but why are they never individually categorized like the Israeli numbers are?

For all we know a great majority of that number were actually fighters, even some of the Palistinian minors, and thus legitimate war targets. Depending on the true percentages, it could give those tallies an entirely new meaning.

Same thing with the Lebanese casualty numbers in the present campaign. How many are Hez and how many innocent civilians caught in the crossfire? Unless we know how can we judge the true situation over there?
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-08-03T002002Z_01_L02240208_RTRUKOC_0_UK-MIDEAST-GAZA.xml&archived=False


A second airstrike east of Rafah killed one Palestinian and wounded another, witnesses said. It was not immediately clear if they were militants or civilians.

Israel has killed at least 156 Palestinians, more than half of them civilians, in Gaza since it began an offensive to stop gunmen from firing rockets into Israel and to pressure militants to free a soldier that armed groups captured on June 25
That's just on the Gaza front since June 25; beyond that I don't know the breakdown offhand, but if I come across it anywhere I'll post it. Its interesting to see that contrary to their claims, the IDF is pretty adept at killing indiscriminately with their precision weapons and high regard for civilian casualties.

[TteFAboB]

The Hizbollah fights an asymmetrical war.

That means any attempt to compare or demand proportionality is a waste of time. In asymmetry, things are nor equal nor proportionate.

Looking at the latest 200-rocket Hizbollah attack on Israel just proves Skybird's argument even further and that the Hizbollah is indeed fighting an asymmetric war.

In such a war, the battlefield is political and the combatants are principles, not soldiers. The Hizbollah seems to have deliberately saved a tactical reserve of rockets to use after the Israeli response. That means they understand their victories are achieved with Israeli weapons. The Hizbollah attacked Israel, then waited for the Israeli response, allowed all the human shields to perish, the infrastructe to be destroyed and then, just now, they launch a massive attack to attempt to make the world buy the Israeli response was useless, that you cannot destroy a guerrilla with a standing army and that all those who died were innocent civilians.

Notice the timing. If the Hizbollah's motivation was to kill as many Israelis as possible in the shortest amount of time they would have launched everything they had on day 1, instead of saving 200 rockets for now. But they are not blood-thristy fanatics, they are cool-minded strategists who know perfectly well how to fight an asymmetric war in the field of battle and in the media. Also, notice that they managed to keep 200 rockets in hiding. This would not be possible without the cooperation of the "civilian" population nor would it be possible to hide them in the open field, the katyushas in open field were already destroyed by Israel, these were being held at school libraries and hospital depots.

Then a cease-fire is proposed. The logic is absurd: The Hizbollah may still have another salvo of rockets in their pockets waiting for the next political opportunity (they do not seek a massive single attack to kill as much Israelis as possible because they don't have unlimited rockets, if they had they would, but they fire in salvos because it's their only chance of winning the political battle with a limited supply of weapons), and Israel should stop its campaign and withdraw.

Test your motivations with this logic: The more Israel allows its enemies, those who seek to completely annihilate it, to re-organize and arm themselves to the teeth, the more Israel is contributing to peace in the region.

If you think that's correct, you are either ill-intentioned or affected by short-sighted pacifist humanism.

[scandium]

I think I have been too harsh on Israel, as there are indeed some voices of sanity there who get it, and as time goes on I think more there will as well. From Haaretz:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/745313.html

No situation can continue to exist for long without an ideological reason. That's how when once it was clear that it was not achieving its aims, an unsuccessful military campaign was upgraded with the wave of a magic wand to the level of a war of survival. When everyone understood that a moral reason had to be found both for the dimensions of the destruction sowed in Lebanon and the killing of the civilian population there, and for the Israeli dead and wounded (nobody is even talking about the exposure of the entire civilian population in the North of Israel to enemy fire while people are kept in disgraceful conditions in bomb shelters), a war of survival was invented, which by nature must be long and exhausting.

That is how a campaign of collective punishment that was begun in haste, without proper judgment and on the basis of incorrect assessments, including promises that the army is incapable of fulfilling, turned into a war of life and death, if not some kind of second War of Independence. In the press there have even been embarrassing comparisons to the struggle against Nazism, comparisons that are not only a crude distortion of history, but disgrace the memory of the Jews who were exterminated.

..

At this point, the average citizen, who is not working day and night in the corridors of power and is not sunning himself near the generals' command rooms, is at a loss. Is this how we are restoring the IDF's power of deterrence? Haven't we accomplished exactly the opposite? Hasn't it become clear to the entire world that our "invincible" air force not only failed for three weeks to end the barrage of rockets, but also even needs an emergency airlift of war materiel, as during the 1973 Yom Kippur War?

Moreover, the ordinary citizen is asking himself another question: If several thousand guerrilla fighters do constitute an existential danger to a country with a strike force and weaponry that are unparalleled in this part of the world, how is it that during the past five or six years we heard nothing to that effect from government leaders?

..

It is frightening to think that those who decided to embark on the present war did not even dream of its outcome and its destructive consequences in almost every possible realm, of the political and psychological damage, the serious blow to the government's credibility, and yes -- the killing of children in vain. The cynicism being demonstrated by government spokesmen, official and otherwise, including several military correspondents, in the face of the disaster suffered by the Lebanese, amazes even someone who has long since lost many of his youthful illusions.

[August]

A second airstrike east of Rafah killed one Palestinian and wounded another, witnesses said. It was not immediately clear if they were militants or civilians.

Israel has killed at least 156 Palestinians, more than half of them civilians, in Gaza since it began an offensive to stop gunmen from firing rockets into Israel and to pressure militants to free a soldier that armed groups captured on June 25
That's just on the Gaza front since June 25; beyond that I don't know the breakdown offhand, but if I come across it anywhere I'll post it. Its interesting to see that contrary to their claims, the IDF is pretty adept at killing indiscriminately with their precision weapons and high regard for civilian casualties.

So we have terms like "at least" "not immediately clear" and "more than half". all are guesses based upon what? A reporters estimation? Hamas press releases? What?

You seem ready to take them at face value but it seems to me that they could just as easily be anti-Isreali propaganda.

[SUBMAN1]

Is this thread still going on? Wow. Figured since I got censored that it wouldn't be long till it was locked. Guess I was wrong.

-S

[August]

Also from Haaretz:

Let's not become confused
By Nadav Shragai http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/images/0.gif

Nathan Alterman, who wrote extensively about purity of arms, wondered many years ago what kind of memorial should be erected for three IDF soldiers -- Hanan Samson, Yossi Kaplan and Boaz Sasson -- who fell while pursuing terrorists, because they were reluctant to harm a nursing mother who stood at the entrance to a cave in the Jordan Valley and behind whom the terrorists were hiding. Should it be an ordinary memorial, like those scattered everywhere else in the country in memory of the fallen in Israel's battles, or perhaps a monument in the shape of a woman with a child at her breast, whose lives the three purchased with their deaths?

Even today, the enemy holds children with one hand and fires on Israeli civilians and soldiers with the other, and the world uses false scales to weigh Israel's morality. Forty years ago, Alterman defined the difference between us and them after the deaths of Samson, Kaplan and Sasson. "There is no question that even by the furthest stretch of our imagination, we would be unable to imagine the possibility of the opposite of what happened during that pursuit. In other words, a situation in which IDF fighters would hide behind Jewish women and children, and use a Jewish nursing mother as camouflage and a hiding place to conceal themselves from Fatah members. IDF soldiers would be incapable of such a thing -- even if we ignore all the other reasons -- first and foremost for the simple reason that a Jewish woman with a baby in her arms is not a 'deterrent factor' for Arab fighters."

What has changed since Alterman's time -- and maybe it's nothing new -- is that not only does the civilian population not constitute a deterrent factor for Hezbollah fighters and for Palestinian terror, but also a civilian population has nearly become their sole target. The IDF, on the other hand, has already sacrificed fighters in Bint Jbail and refrained from massive "target softening" bombing raids from the air in order to avoid killing civilians. In the tragic events of Qana, Hezbollah intentionally set itself up in the heart of civilians, thereby deliberately creating the conditions that led to the disaster.

We cannot become confused and allow the world and ourselves, and particularly the Arab citizens of Israel who live among us, to turn things upside down. Hezbollah, like Palestinian terror, harms women and children with malice in a systematic fashion. We do it rarely and by mistake. These things must be said just because things that are self evident tend to be forgotten.

This war must end in victory and in the disarming of Hezbollah, either by us or by others. That is the line separating victory from a missed opportunity. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is well aware than anything less that that will only serve to draw the starting line of the next campaign against Hezbollah. That is why he is rightly insisting on a continuation of the fighting, and we must help him repel the internal and external pressures to hold our fire already now.

The prime minister also deserves support when it comes to his policy on the issue of the kidnapped soldiers. The leadership must exercise level-headed considerations of profit and loss, cost and returns, and place them on the scales, even if they are cruel. That is why it was decided to refrain during the first stage of fighting from massive use of ground forces in order to prevent heavy losses to the IDF, and that is how Olmert is behaving on the issue of the kidnapped soldiers as well.

It is not easy to write these words, and I hope that the hostages will return home soon and in good health, but the unequivocal opposition to releasing terrorists in exchange for the hostages, to which Olmert is adhering for the time being, is well anchored in the bloody reality in which we live. Fourteen of the mass terrorist attacks in recent years were carried out by freed terrorists. Dozens of attacks in which hundreds of more people were killed or wounded were also organized by freed terrorists.

Confronting the families of the kidnapped men is certainly a heartrending experience for the prime minister, but he must continue to keep these statistics in mind. Israeli behavior in previous kidnapping cases must constitute a warning light, rather than a precedent on which to rely, God forbid.

Just as we have to end the war differently this time, we also have to try to free the kidnapped men this time in another way or at another price. If this time the considerations of "here and now" also get the upper hand, the blood price of the next round will only increase further.

[Iceman]

I for one am almost ashamed that America has not stepped up to the pump and backed Israel full out/out of the closet.They are one of the only sane group of people living over in the middle east, which almost have to have a touch of insanity themselves to do so in the first place, considering her neighbors. Israel says they've had enough then that is good enough for me. We did the same and now are in a unique position to finish up almost the whole job over there.Flex the muscle enough an maybe Egypt will see the light and join up more or less with America and Israel and put Iran back in it's place while we are cleaning house. :)

Almost sounds like Patton huh at the end of WWII? :)

It is becoming crystal clear to many Americans, no matter what some Americans do post here, that the Islam that is practiced in the middle East is just insane and evil period.And that Israel has every right to defend herself however she sees fit aganinst such evils.The condemenation that America should fear is in not helping Israel.

Scandium We Love You :)

[Skybird]

The worth and credibility of pictures from the region: I already had linked it, but it seems to be ignored.



Milking it?
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Update here (http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/07/who-is-this-man.html) and for the agency "rebuttal", see here (http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/08/game-set-and-match.html).

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/320/AP%20Qana.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/1600/AP%20Qana.jpg)Certainly, the photographs are distressing (http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/07/in-whose-interest.html), and indeed they are meant to be. As this piece tells us (http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002914838):

Until recent years, images of civilian casualties in wars often took days to appear in newspapers, but now they can be captured and transmitted around the world to newspaper Web sites, where they are posted immediately, adding to the shock value that sketchy words by reporters often cannot capture. This happened again Sunday morning in the case of the Israeli air strike on the Lebanese village of Qana that left dozens dead, reportedly at least half of them children sleeping in their beds overnight.

The photos, taken by The Associated Press, Reuters, and others, showed bodies in the rubble, or being taken away; survivors digging or wailing…
But the photographers, it seems, are not too fussy about how they go about "adding to the shock value". These two sequences illustrate the extent to which photographers on the scene are prepared to ensure that the "shock value" is maximised.

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/320/Reuters%20qana.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/1600/Reuters%20qana.jpg)In this first of the two sequences, we see a shot by Reuters and taken by Adnan Hajj, timed at 2:21 pm. It has the caption:

Rescuers pull the body of a toddler victim of an Israeli air raid on Qana that killed more than 60 people, the majority of them women and children, in south Lebanon, July 30, 2006.Note the "rescue worker" in the foreground, complete with olive green military-style helmet and fluorescent jacket, with what appears to be a flack jacket underneath. His glasses, "designer stubble", blue tee-shirt and jeans make him quite a distinctive figure. Note also, he has a radio in his jacker pocket and he has bare hands, things which becomes relevant later.

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/320/qana%20victim%2001.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/1600/qana%20victim%2001.jpg)The next shot in this sequence is credited to AP's Kevin Frayer. Timed at 4.09 pm, it shows the same "rescue" worker, and has this caption:

Lebanese Red Cross and Civil Defense workers carry the body of a small child covered in dust from the rubble of his home that was hit in an Israeli missile strike in the village of Qana, east of the port city of Tyre, Lebanon, Sunday. Lebanese Red Cross officials said 56 people died in the Israeli assault on the village, including 34 children. Rescuers dug through the debris to remove dozens of bodies.This is horrific, but a scrutiny of the framing does suggest that the subject is offering the victim to the photographer.

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/320/Reuters%20Qana%2002.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/1600/Reuters%20Qana%2002.jpg)Just in case you missed it, however, we get another view, courtesy of Reuter's Adnan Hajj, with a time given of 4:30 pm - some 20 minutes after the first shot. The caption reads:

A rescuer carries the body of a toddler victim of an Israeli air raid on Qana that killed more than 60 people, the majority of them women and children, in south Lebanon, July 30, 2006.Interestingly, in this sequence, the pocket radio is missing. And, although the positioning of the child looks the same, the angle of the shot looks to be about ninety degrees from the first, but in each case, the "worker" is facing towards the camera. The shots are clearly posed.

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/320/AP%20Qana%2005.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/1600/AP%20Qana%2005.jpg)But now, timed at 12:45 pm, an hour and twenty minutes before the child's body is pictured being pulled from the ruins, we get a picture from AP's Kevin Frayer of the same child's body being paraded by our ubiquitous helmeted rescue worker.

Lebanese Red Cross and Civil Defense workers carry the body of a small child covered in dust from the rubble of his home that was hit in an Israeli missile strike in the village of Qana, east of the port city of Tyre, Lebanon, Sunday, July 30, 2006. Lebanese Red Cross officials said 56 people died in the Israeli assault on the village, including 34 children. Rescuers dug through the debris to remove dozens of bodies.http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/320/AP%20Qana%2004.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/1600/AP%20Qana%2004.jpg)At 12.53 pm, after an interval of eight minutes, Frayer photographs the child's body again, from a different angle. The caption is the same. This time, though, our helmeted worker is showing some distress, which was absent in the previous photograph.

The photographs show the characters moving down the hill, with little distance between the scenes, which suggest that they have been taken sequentially and spontaneously. But they have not. The eight minute interval has allowed a crowd to gather around "green helmet". Furthermore, "orange jacket" has switched from left to right. Note also the tee-shirted man in the centre of the picture.

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/320/AP%20Qana%2003.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/1600/AP%20Qana%2003.jpg)Then, timed at 1:01 pm, eight minutes on, we get another picture from Frayer. Once again, the caption is the same but this time the child's body is being paraded aloft by our ubiquitous helmeted rescue worker, but the tee-shirted character had moved from centre to right and is taking his turn to displaying his emotion to the camera. The UN soldier in the background has turned away, confirming a time lapse. The scene is clearly staged, as have been those preceding it.

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/320/AP%20721%20am.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/1600/AP%20721%20am.jpg)Next, we have the second of the two sequences, the first shot of which, timed at 7.21 am shows a dead girl in an ambulance. Taken by AP, the caption reads:

Among others, the body of a child recovered under the rubble of a demolished building that was struck by Israeli war plane missiles at the village of Qana near the southern Lebanon city of Tyre, is placed in an ambulance Sunday July 30.http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/320/AP%201025%20am.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/1600/AP%201025%20am.jpg)In the next frame, we have the same girl, this time apparently being placed in the ambulance. Also taken by AP,this time by Mohammed Zaatari the caption here reads:

A Lebanese rescuer carries the body of a young girl recovered from under the rubble of a demolished building that was struck by Israeli warplane missiles at the village of Qana, near the southern city of Tyre, Lebanon, Sunday, July 30, 2006. Dozens of civilians, including many children, were killed Sunday in an Israeli airstrike that flattened houses in this southern Lebanon village - the deadliest attack in 19 days of fighting.Intriguingly, though, the dateline given is 10.25 am, three hours after she has already been photographed in the ambulance.

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/320/AP%201245%20pm.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/1600/AP%201245%20pm.jpg)Also from AP's Nasser Nasser, we see the same worker, showing obvious distress, carrying the same girl. But now he is wearing his fluorescent jacket and helmet and has acquired latex gloves. He has also got his radio back. The photograph is timed at 10.44 am and the caption reads:

A civil defense worker carries the body of Lebanese child recovered from the rubble of a demolished building that was struck by an Israeli airstrike at the village of Qana near the southern Lebanon city of Tyre, Sunday, July 30, 2006. Israeli missiles struck this southern Lebanese village early Sunday, flattening houses on top of sleeping residents. The Lebanese Red Cross said the airstrike, in which at least 34 children were killed, pushed the overall Lebanese death toll to more than 500.http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/320/AP%20unknown%201.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/1600/AP%20unknown%201.jpg)Here we are now, same "worker" and same girl, but this time it is done for the benefit of EPA, the photographer, Mohamed Messara, the worker rushing towards a uniformed Red Cross worker. This caption (without a time) reads:

A rescue worker carries the body of a Lebanese girl after an Israeli air strike on the village of Qana, east of the southern port city of Tyre, on Sunday 30 July 2006. At least 51 people were killed, many of them children, and several others wounded in the raid Sunday, witnesses and rescue workers said.http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/320/AP%20guerney.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/1600/AP%20guerney.jpg)But now, for the benefit of AFP, the photgraph taken by Nicolas Asfouri, we have the same unfortunate child being handled by another worker, the original worker showing in the background, having passed the casualty on. The timing of the photograph is 7.16 pm (now apparently corrected to 6:46 am (http://news.yahoo.com/photos/ss/events/wl/080601mideast/im:/060731/photos_ts_wl_afp/e9fcb842650822536e77419b605bb921;_ylt=AivKFN1lIb64 htSj_rSWRggFO7gF;_ylu=X3oDMTA5bGcyMWMzBHNlYwNzc25h dg--)) and the caption reads:

A rescue worker puts the body of a dead girl on a gurney after Israeli air strikes on the southern Lebanese village of Qana. Israel agreed to temporarily halt air strikes in south Lebanon a day after 52 people were killed, many of them sleeping children, when Israeli warplanes bombarded the Lebanese village of Qana, triggering global outrage and warnings of retribution for alleged "war crimes".Remember, however, earlier in the sequence, the girl is being carried to the ambulance, by the other worker, sans jacket, helmet and gloves.

(picture deleted due to forum limit of 12)

Finally, in this sequence, we get another shot from AP's Nasser Nasser, again without a timing but with this caption:

A civil defence worker carries a body of a young Lebanese child recovered from the rubble of a demolished building that was struck by Israeli war plane missiles at the village of Qana near the southern Lebanon city of Tyre, Sunday, July 30, 2006.Whatever else, the event in Qana was a human tragedy. But the photographs do not show it honestly. Rather, they have been staged for effect, exploiting the victims in an unwholesome manner. In so doing, they are no longer news photographs - they are propaganda. And, whoever said the camera cannot lie forgot that photographers can and do. Those lies have spread throughout the world by now and will be in this morning's newspapers, accepted as real by the millions who view them.

The profession of photo-journalism thereby is sadly diminished by them, and the trust in those who took them and in those who carried them is misplaced. Truly, we are dealing with loathesome creatures.

[Skybird]

missing pic: above:

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/320/qana%20victim%2002.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/1600/qana%20victim%2002.jpg)

[Skybird]

Game, set and match


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http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/320/green%20helmet%20020.0.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/1600/green%20helmet%20020.0.jpg)Well, I never. The news agencies that stitched up the photos (http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/07/milking-it.html) at the Qana site have all huddled together and got AP staff writer David Bauder to issue a story rebutting (http://www.forbes.com/home/feeds/ap/2006/08/01/ap2920008.html) lil ol' EU Referendum. And the imaginative title? "News agencies stand by Lebanon photos".

To engineer this massive intellectual feat, Bauder – who contacted this site asking us to ring him in New York at our own expense to answer his questions, but did not respond to our e-mail offering this blogger's telephone number – relied on the one post (http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/07/milking-it.html), but clearly did not bother to read the others, and particularly the latest (http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/08/we-need-to-know-truth.html), which already anticipated the points he was to make.

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/320/Reuters%20Qana%2002.1.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/1600/Reuters%20Qana%2002.1.jpg)Thus does Bauder concentrate his fire on the one point of several, where he claims this site rests its case of "chicanery" on the part of the agencies on the "time stamps" that went with captions of the photographs. Laboriously, he details the timings, and then sets outs our case, that the events depicted were staged for effect, "a criticism echoed by talk show host Rush Limbaugh when he directed listeners to the blog on Monday."

"These photographers are obviously willing to participate in propaganda," Limbaugh is cited as saying. "They know exactly what's being done, all these photos, bringing the bodies out of the rubble, posing them for the cameras, it's all staged. Every bit of it is staged and the still photographers know it."

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/320/green%20helmet%20004.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/1600/green%20helmet%20004.jpg)The "straw dog" thus set up, AP's Bauder then sets about rebutting it, declaring "information from its photo editors showed the events were not staged, and that the time stamps could be misleading for several reasons, including that web sites can use such stamps to show when pictures are posted, not taken." Note, however, the use of the word "can". He does not say that the "date stamps" are wrong.

Nevertheless, an aggrieved "AFP executive" is then wheeled on, saying, "he was stunned to be questioned about it." The MSM being questioned? Shocking, I tell you, shocking!

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/320/AP%20Qana%2003.0.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/1600/AP%20Qana%2003.0.jpg)Then al Reuters is brought into the fray. In a statement, it says that it categorically rejects any such suggestion and then Kathleen Carroll, AP's senior vice president and executive editor, puts the boot in. "It's hard to imagine how someone sitting in an air-conditioned office or broadcast studio many thousands of miles from the scene can decide what occurred on the ground with any degree of accuracy," she says.

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/320/AP%20Qana%2004.0.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/1600/AP%20Qana%2004.0.jpg)Air conditioning? I wish.

But Carroll hasn't finished yet. "In addition to personally speaking with photo editors", she says – who tell the absolute, unvarnished truth - "I also know from 30 years of experience in this business that you can't get competitive journalists to participate in the kind of (staging) experience that is being described." Photographers are experienced in recognizing when someone is trying to stage something for their benefit, she adds.

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/320/AP%20Qana%2005.0.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/1600/AP%20Qana%2005.0.jpg)Now administering the coup de grace, Patrick Baz, Mideast photo director for AFP, is trundled up to the front. "Do you really think these people would risk their lives under Israeli shelling to set up a digging ceremony for dead Lebanese kids?" he asks. He is not "stunned". He is "totally stunned". And he "can't imagine that somebody would think something like that would have happened."

So, all the agencies are agreed - none of the photographs have been staged. Game set and match!

But then, you really have to give it to AP - they really know how to look after their staff (http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=21885_AP_Rewards_Qana_Photographers&only). Thank you, Little Green Footballs. And this (http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2006/0410nj1.htm) in the National Journal rather puts the claims into perspective. Anyone remember this gem (http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/01/picture-cannot-lie.html) from the NYT?

[Skybird]

And for the sake of completion, and because it is another wonderful example that evenmade it's way over to Germany:


A picture cannot lie?

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http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/320/afghan%20missile.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/1600/afghan%20missile.jpg)And if you believe that, you will believe anything. But in this instance, it is the caption that conveys the "lie".

It was picked up by one of our alert readers (http://www.eureferendum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1114) and is now all over the blogosphere (see here (http://www.reason.com/hitandrun/2006/01/the_new_york_ti.shtml), for instance, and here (http://michellemalkin.com/)).

In the original copy, the caption, printed under a photograph (above - double-click to enlarge) published by the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/international/asia/15pakistan.html?ei=5094&en=82150cfff0450a67&hp=&ex=1137301200&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print) reads: "Pakistani men with the remains of a missile fired at a house in the Bajur tribal zone near the Afghan border."

The photograph accompanied the story on the "deadly American airstrike" on a village in the northwestern tribal region last week, aimed at killing Ayman al-Zawahiri, and purports to be a picture of the post-strike scene. Only now has the NYT made a correction, after the blogs had run riot, and appended: "A picture caption on Saturday with an article about a US airstrike on a village in Pakistan misidentified an unexploded ordinance (sic). It was not the remains of a missile fired at a house."

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/320/shell_155mm_artillery-thumb.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/1600/shell_155mm_artillery-thumb.jpg)The "unidentified ordnance" is certainly an artillery shell, probably 155mm, and from what remains of the markings, looks to be a Nato-type high explosive round. From the striations on the rotating band (http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/bullets2.htm) near the base of the round, it has almost certainly been fired, which means that the NYT is probably right in describing it as "unexploded". The fuze cap is missing but the fuze looks to be still in place, which makes it rather a hairy piece of furniture to be playing with. (The illustration on the right shows the shell with a "lifting ring" at the top, in the place where the fuze is fitted before firing.)

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/320/Hellfire_AGM-114A_missile.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4640/388/1600/Hellfire_AGM-114A_missile.0.jpg)So, what's the big deal? Well, the US strike was undertaken by a Predator UCAV, the only weapon-fit for which is the Hellfire missile (illustrated). Whatever else, the picture used does not even begin to show the remains of a such a weapon.

The point, of course, is that the mismatch between the picture and the text is easily detectable and shows, at the very least, an appalling lack of professionalism on the part of the NYT. It also tends to support the thesis that the NYT is slanting its coverage to match its anti-administration slant – the set-up of the photograph inviting empathy with its subjects.

Whatever view you take of the cause of the "error", it casts doubt on all the details attributed to the photograph. It is attributed to "Thir Khan/AFP--Getty Images" – AFP not being the most reliable of sources. How do we know even that it was taken in Pakistan at the scene of the strike? Its computer file-name is "14cnd-afghan.583x404", which might even suggest it was taken in Afghanistan.

Crucially though, if you cannot trust the caption text, how can you trust the text of the article accompanying it? Any errors there are not so easily detectable and you have to take the details on trust. But, if the editorial staff cannot even get such obvious details right in the caption, any such trust would be misplaced.

This is the great "professional" MSM in action – or an example of it – so full of itself and its virtues. And without the blogs, it would have remained unrecorded.

[Skybird]

"Do you really think these people would risk their lives under Israeli shelling to set up a digging ceremony for dead Lebanese kids?" he asks. He is not "stunned". He is "totally stunned". And he "can't imagine that somebody would think something like that would have happened."

Exactly that is the problem, and the reason for Hizbollah'S propaganda success. People cannot imagine that somebody could be evil enough to do such things. That's why they get away with it. Our way of thinking is way too kind.

There is a story from world war two, I first red about it in the novel by Herman Wouk, but meanwhile learend that it has a historically true core. A Polish jew was said to have escaped with film material from german KZs in Poland, and made it finally to Britain or the US, I do not remember. He met with a high representative of the foreign ministry. that man saw the photos, and couldn'T believe the horror they documented. When he met that Polish Jew, he said: "I don't believe this." The Jew asked: "You think I am lying?" And the politicians said: "No, I do not believe you lie, I say this truth is more than I can believe." As a result it was not believed, the knoweldge of German KZs started to spread much later in history only, for at this opportunity it landed in one box under the table. People knew the Germans were crazy, but noone was willing to believe that they could be so evil that they do such horrific things like raising KZs and industrially killing Jews there.

[Skybird]

And a German-language piece, about the family that was killed by an Israeli gunboat at the beach some weeks ago. Or was it not that gunboat, but someone else...? Has even anyone been killed at all...? http://www.sueddeutsche.de/ausland/artikel/315/78237/

[Skybird]

It seems there is a problem with the many photos being transmitted. If you happen to see empty boxes, look the articles here:

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/07/milking-it.html
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/07/who-is-this-man.html
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/08/game-set-and-match.html
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/01/picture-cannot-lie.html

Note that the text includes many links to many more photo fakes from the region.

Meanwhile I discovered that they even awarded the success of this pro-Hezbollah propaganda.-coup:

An LGF reader has forwarded the following email (I suppose you could say our reader “leaked” it), sent to all Associated Press employees, congratulating themselves on the propaganda photos from Qana and awarding the photographers cash prizes:

Dear Staffers:
Last Sunday proved to be one of the most dramatic days in the war between Israel and Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon. AP’s extensive photo team produced a stunning series of images that day that beat the competition and scored huge play worldwide.
Rumors surfaced early Sunday morning that an Israeli airstrike had flattened a house in the southern Lebanese village of Qana. The number of deaths wasn’t immediately known, but the seriousness of the incident was clear. Beirut-based photographer Hussein Malla immediately called AP photographers Nasser Nasser, Lefteris Pitarakis and stringer Mohammed Zaatari and advised them to rush to the scene. Nasser arrived as the bodies of many civilians — including numerous children — were being pulled from the rubble. Lefteris later took over, enabling Nasser to get his pictures swiftly onto the wire. Kevin Frayer was dispatched from Beirut to boost AP’s presence. Throughout the morning, AP’s team filed a steady stream of powerful images.
Meanwhile, in Beirut, a small Hezbollah demonstration exploded into violence at word of the Qana attack. Hezbollah supporters stormed the nearby United Nations building, scaling walls and smashing their way past bulletproof glass barriers to enter the building itself. Photographers Hussein Malla, Kevork Djansezian and Ben Curtis were all there to capture the rioting. Beirut-based photo editor Dalia Khamissy coordinated with photographers in the field and handled a steady stream of stringer photos. All day long, AP photographers relayed what they were seeing to AP reporters for print stories.
Nasser’s most haunting image showed a man emerging from the rubble carrying the lifeless and dust-covered body of a child. Calm, morning light shone down on man and child, highlighting them against an almost monochrome background of pure rubble. ... Nasser’s image ran on the front pages of at least 33 newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Post. It also won a double-page center spread in The Guardian of London. Lefteris’s image of a resident weeping next to a row of bodies made the front of The Washington Post, among many others. Hussein, Kevork and Ben’s images of the storming of the UN building easily beat those of the competition.
For a day of outstanding a memorable photos, taken in conditions of substantial danger, the Lebanon photo team of Nasser Nasser, Lefteris Pitarakis, Kevin Frayer, Mohammed Zaatari, Ben Curtis, Hussein Malla, Kevork Djansezian and Dalia Khamissy shares this week’s $500 Beat of the Week award. http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=21885_AP_Rewards_Qana_Photographers&only

[TteFAboB]

Well Skybird, this whole propaganda war brings me back in time.

When I studied revolutionary war in the 60's, based on the teachings of Ho Chi Minh, Nguyen Von Giap and Maozedong, I was instructed that we had three levels of popular organization: strikes, terrorism and difuse guerrillas, "foquismo" (Che Guevara) or rural guerrilla (Maoist), and finally constituting a 'libertation' army. The latter should progressively evolve into a regular armed force as the enemy hesitated (or the contrary if the enemy responded succesfully).

The Hizbollah seems to lie in this last stage. The Geneva convention is often invoked by their defenders as if they were already a libertation army, but they wear no uniform to apply to it. They don't practice unconsequential "terrorism" anymore and now their actions are well thought-out and planned with a long-term scenario in mind, reactive to Israeli response. They don't simply kill as many Israelis as possible randomly and indiscriminately like a bunch of angry, nationalistic crazy people, they don't blast individual restaurants or busses, they plan and time their rocket bombardments to attempt to sway the international opinion. Why do you think the Hizbollah didn't fired almost any rocket while Israel initially responded, and then all of a sudden they launch a massive 200-missile strike at once?! Because they wanted to make sure the damage Israel was causing would not share the news with their own attacks and totalitarian motivations. And draw Israel into their own territory, where they can bleed and hurt the IDF by re-activating their guerrilla and terrorist tactics, if the IDF withdraws, the Hizbollah has all the room necessary to set-up a standing army if the opportunity for total war ever arises (with Iranian or Syrian intervention for example). But would the Lebanese allow such a thing to happen? Well, they didn't want, or failed, to prevent all this arsenal from entering the country, I doubt the government didn't helped the Hizbollah smuggle/simply cross the border with all this weaponry, but even if they didn't, they are completely uncapable of stopping the Hizbollah anyway.

Also, isn't it strange that humanism is privatized by the supporters of the Hizbollah? Maybe not because there's much more to it than counting bodies, victims and terrorists. In May, 2004, Hassan Abbassi, a leading advisor to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, announced:

"We have a strategy drawn up for the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization and for the uprooting of the Americans and the English. The global infidel front is a front against Allah and the Muslims, and we must make use of everything we have at hand to strike at this front by means of our suicide operations or by means of our missiles. There are 29 sensitive sites in the U.S. and in the West. We have already spied on these sites and we know how we are going to attack them."

The humanism appeal is but a smoke screen to attempt to hide the fact what's at stake isn't Lebanese civilians, rockets and the survival of the state of Israel. The Hizbollah is but a player in the global network against civilization and it will be defended, used, aided or abandoned depending on how the situation develops. Many guerrilla forces were completely annihilated by their former leaders once those secured power. It's much easier to commandeer the official army replacing a few officers than substitute its entire structure by the guerrila. The Hizbollah fights for Iran as it fights for its own survival, becoming redundant, superfluous, or irrelevant would be their sentence to death, thus, if the conditions and situation does not (currently?) allow evolution into a regular army, they must at least carry on the fight with Israel indefinitely or untill they are ultimately defeated.

[Skybird]

Me you must not convince!

and as for the Geneva convetion banning this or that kind of warfare, I never understood why it is considered acceptable and according to the law to be smashed under the track of a tank, or getting shreddered by an artillery round, but being cut by a laser of being killed by gas is considered to be unacceptable and against the law. It is idiotic, a foolish, almost cynical attempt to give war a human face that is doe snot have. War and peace have two completely different value systems, and two completely different internal logics by which their existence is defined. It makes no sense to judge the one with the value system of the other. It makes no sense to condemn war by referring values valid for peace times, like you do not use war-values during peace. If you want to criticise war for being there, okay, that I can understand, but criticising war for being brutal and harsh and cruel is beyond what I can understand - it is foolish. Since I refuse to participate in this mixing up, I only say: be careful to trigger war without having damn good reasons, and have no illusions about what war means. Try to avoid it - but not at any costs, for eventually the costs for a freedom at all costs can be much higher than the costs of war. But if you wage war - then try to be the most brutal and lethal beast in the universe and do not accept any self-restraints and hesitation - for it is war you live in then, not peace. The difference between war and peace means replacing one universe with another.

On your remarks on Islam's attitude towards the anglo-saxon world, that is very much also the attitude towards the whole non-Islamic rest of the world. I must not go into that, by now you already know what I think about Muhammedanism.

[Fish]

http://home.hccnet.nl/wico.p/thebigdifference2sth3.jpg

[Fish]

From: http://allisonkaplansommer.blogmosis.com/

August 02, 2006
The Mystery Man in the Green Helmet Has a Name

I came across al-Jazeera footage on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyZsq3jyJ6w&mode=related&search=qana%20)in which there was an interview with the mysterious and now world-famous mystery man in the green helmet (http://olehgirl.blogspot.com/2006/08/qana-casualties-that-werent-evidence.html)at the Kana bombing site.

Thanks to a friendly Arabic speaker, I got this brief summary of what he said and a bit of the translator's commentary.His name is Abdel Qader. He claims that they couldn't reach the building before 8 am because of the conditions of the road and the danger of being hit by the Israeli airforce. His voice is girly and his clothes look impeccably clean!

[Skybird]

His name is Abdel Qader. He claims that they couldn't reach the building before 8 am because of the conditions of the road and the danger of being hit by the Israeli airforce. His voice is girly and his clothes look impeccably clean!


Abdel Qader?

(...) we have been offered the iconic figure of "Green Helmet" who, a number of our readers suggest, is Abu Shadi Jradi. (...)

:D What now?

from:
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/08/green-helmet-mystery-continues.html
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/08/we-need-to-know-truth.html

I hope this backfires onto Hezbollah. As one of the above articles suggests, their faking of scenes of "events" could do them far more damage in the West than the IDF.

I again remind of the beach incident some weeks ago, that most probably was not caused by Israel at all. But I think Israel is a bit to passive on this media front today, leaving it's enemy too much space to wage propaganda wars that time and again spikes hot sentiments in the Muhammedan world that is not too critical in asking questions about authenticity.

[scandium]

A second airstrike east of Rafah killed one Palestinian and wounded another, witnesses said. It was not immediately clear if they were militants or civilians.

Israel has killed at least 156 Palestinians, more than half of them civilians, in Gaza since it began an offensive to stop gunmen from firing rockets into Israel and to pressure militants to free a soldier that armed groups captured on June 25
That's just on the Gaza front since June 25; beyond that I don't know the breakdown offhand, but if I come across it anywhere I'll post it. Its interesting to see that contrary to their claims, the IDF is pretty adept at killing indiscriminately with their precision weapons and high regard for civilian casualties.
So we have terms like "at least" "not immediately clear" and "more than half". all are guesses based upon what? A reporters estimation? Hamas press releases? What?

You seem ready to take them at face value but it seems to me that they could just as easily be anti-Isreali propaganda.
They're not using the words "not immediately clear" when they cite the total number of palestinians killed since June 25; and as to "anti-Israeli" propaganda, this article is from Reuters and they wouldn't have the international respect they have if they push propaganda of any kind. By the way, Reuters is not the WSJ, the Washington Post or the NY Times; even though I read all three of those they all have their respective biases and they all editorialize. Reuters, on the other hand, is a wire service that tends to keep its articles concise and to the point.

And you are too willing to give Israel the benefit of the doubt everytime, even when the evidence is to the contrary, and take every word their governments say as though it were the whole truth, and as though governments never spin, never lie, and never try and paint events to put them in the best light possible. All governments do this, Israel included, and maybe even Israel especially if you know anything at all about their history. I was once naive about that, knowing little more than what I read in the pro-Israeli American & Canadian press, but that is changing as I learn more and more about the region and its history. So yeah, I'm inclined to take that statement from Reuters that says at least half of them killed were civilians at face value, and if you really believe its inaccurate then how about you dig up some proof with which to dismiss it?

By the way August, I noticed that when Skybird was posting about the 1,100 "Israelis murdered by Hezbollah since 2000" you never once applied the skepticism to that figure you apply to my posts to his even though he pulled that number from thin air. Yet my numbers come from Reuters, my facts from respected international news organizations (and always cited and quoted), while those you (and others) consistently give a free pass to are the ones who consistently cite such biased fringe groups as JW and LGF - why is that?

And yet you will lecture me on propaganda.

[scandium]

Skybird,

To post those pictures on a site like this that includes among its members young teenagers is in very poor taste, at a minimum. To then further use them to claim that they have been somehow fabricated or staged is even lower - have you no shame at all?

[Gizzmoe]

I´ve deleted the post, some of the pictures really were too graphic.

[joea]

Me you must not convince!

and as for the Geneva convetion banning this or that kind of warfare, I never understood why it is considered acceptable and according to the law to be smashed under the track of a tank, or getting shreddered by an artillery round, but being cut by a laser of being killed by gas is considered to be unacceptable and against the law. It is idiotic, a foolish, almost cynical attempt to give war a human face that is doe snot have. War and peace have two completely different value systems, and two completely different internal logics by which their existence is defined. It makes no sense to judge the one with the value system of the other. It makes no sense to condemn war by referring values valid for peace times, like you do not use war-values during peace. If you want to criticise war for being there, okay, that I can understand, but criticising war for being brutal and harsh and cruel is beyond what I can understand - it is foolish. Since I refuse to participate in this mixing up, I only say: be careful to trigger war without having damn good reasons, and have no illusions about what war means. Try to avoid it - but not at any costs, for eventually the costs for a freedom at all costs can be much higher than the costs of war. But if you wage war - then try to be the most brutal and lethal beast in the universe and do not accept any self-restraints and hesitation - for it is war you live in then, not peace. The difference between war and peace means replacing one universe with another.

On your remarks on Islam's attitude towards the anglo-saxon world, that is very much also the attitude towards the whole non-Islamic rest of the world. I must not go into that, by now you already know what I think about Muhammedanism.

Well I can see your point, but I hope never to see posts from you criticising Bomber Command's campaign in WWII, or the Red Army's explusions of civilians in East Prussia in 1945. Since next week are the anniversaries of the a-bombs in Japan which like the Tokyo fire bombing were meant to bring home to the population (like the actions against Germany) of the cost of continuing the war of agression they the Axis powers unleashed.

[August]

They're not using the words "not immediately clear" when they cite the total number of palestinians killed since June 25; and as to "anti-Israeli" propaganda, this article is from Reuters and they wouldn't have the international respect they have if they push propaganda of any kind. By the way, Reuters is not the WSJ, the Washington Post or the NY Times; even though I read all three of those they all have their respective biases and they all editorialize. Reuters, on the other hand, is a wire service that tends to keep its articles concise and to the point.

And you are too willing to give Israel the benefit of the doubt everytime, even when the evidence is to the contrary, and take every word their governments say as though it were the whole truth, and as though governments never spin, never lie, and never try and paint events to put them in the best light possible. All governments do this, Israel included, and maybe even Israel especially if you know anything at all about their history. I was once naive about that, knowing little more than what I read in the pro-Israeli American & Canadian press, but that is changing as I learn more and more about the region and its history. So yeah, I'm inclined to take that statement from Reuters that says at least half of them killed were civilians at face value, and if you really believe its inaccurate then how about you dig up some proof with which to dismiss it?

By the way August, I noticed that when Skybird was posting about the 1,100 "Israelis murdered by Hezbollah since 2000" you never once applied the skepticism to that figure you apply to my posts to his even though he pulled that number from thin air. Yet my numbers come from Reuters, my facts from respected international news organizations (and always cited and quoted), while those you (and others) consistently give a free pass to are the ones who consistently cite such biased fringe groups as JW and LGF - why is that?

And yet you will lecture me on propaganda.

No need to act indignant Scandium, all i asked was where the figures came from, and apparently neither you, or Reuters, is saying. Reuters may be a respected news organization, but so was CBS and that didn't stop them from reporting complete fabrications about Bush's military service as truth. CBS didn't create the lie but they were more than williing to swallow someone elses. I suspect something similar is happening with Reuters. Not intentionally mind you, but they certainly do not have the ability to come up with an independant verification for Palestinian casualty claims in in the West Bank because no independant authority exists for those figures. They are simply reporting what the Palestinian Authority or Hezbollah tells them.

BTW your sources are no less biased as anyone elses here. I'd have to quit my job and sit here full time to comment on all of them. As for Skybird in particular, we've had our share of major disagreements in the past so he gets no pass from me, but i'm curious why you would bring that up if not to sidestep the question. Are the holes in your argument becoming a little difficult to cover up?

Like i said, I am suspicious of the accuracy of casualty reports that are published within hours, sometimes within minutes of the event, yet are never subsequently adjusted one way or the other. I am suspicious of casualty figures that never, ever distinguish between Arab fighters and civilians.

If you want to put out casualty figures as part of your ongoing argument that the Jews are the evil ones in this conflict then you ought to expect some questioning.

[scandium]

BTW your sources are no less biased as anyone elses here.
August you don't realize that there's a difference between, on the one hand, partisan/ideological "sources" (be they "left" or "right") such as Powerline, Democratic Underground, Little Green Footballs, Daily Kos, and Jihad Watch vs Reuters and the BBC? You think they are all the same?

I have only ever once posted an article/link, unwittingly, to an ideological website and it was pointed out - by all people - AL who posts regularly articles from Jihad Watch, LGF, Powerline, World Net Daily News, Transcendental Meditations, and the like all of which are partisan/ideological motivated and none of which are held to the same standards as Reuters, BBC, etc because they do not do journalism.

You mention CBS but look what happened when the dossier proved to be a forgery - CBS was smeared relentlessly and Dan Rather was fired. These news organizations make mistakes but are accountable for them, as in the case of CBS, and they distinquish their editorial commentary from their news reporting and take pains to separate the one from the other. Are Powerline, LGF, WND News, and JW held to the same standards and do they adopt the same practices of at least attempting accuracy in reporting etc? No, of course not.

If you think my sources, which are consistently from the latter group, are no different than those from the former group than I don't know what to say to you August.

Are the holes in your argument becoming a little difficult to cover up? What holes? I cite my arguements, if you have anything with which to refute it - aside from rhetorical sniping from the sidelines - then by all means, post it.

If you want to put out casualty figures as part of your ongoing argument that the Jews are the evil ones in this conflict then you ought to expect some questioning.
I do not believe the Jews are evil, nor have I ever said anything remotely resembling that. The actions of the Israeli government, and its military, I certainly do believe to be immoral, disproportionate, counter productive, and ultimately futile. And that I have said repeatedly.

[waste gate]

Originally Posted by scandium
I do not believe the Jews are evil, nor have I ever said anything remotely resembling that. The actions of the Israeli government, and its military, I certainly do believe to be immoral, disproportionate, counter productive, and ultimately futile. And that I have said repeatedly.


Democracies are governments where the people as a whole - hold political power. It may be exercised by them (direct democracy), or through representatives chosen by them (representative democracy).

In a round about way you are saying that everyone who participates in Isreali political process (Jew, Arab, Christian, Other) are immoral, disproportionate, counter productive, and ultimately futile.

[fredbass]

If you want to put out casualty figures as part of your ongoing argument that the Jews are the evil ones in this conflict then you ought to expect some questioning.
I do not believe the Jews are evil, nor have I ever said anything remotely resembling that. The actions of the Israeli government, and its military, I certainly do believe to be immoral, disproportionate, counter productive, and ultimately futile. And that I have said repeatedly.

I'd venture to bet that none of us here know what kind of intelligence the Israelis have and why they've used the amount of force that we've witnessed, and it's easy to expect things to be so one sided given the overwhelming strength which the Israeli forces have over their enemy.

The Israeli's response to what happened to their soldiers may seem disproportionate but maybe it will make the terrorists think twice about messing with them next time. Plus I think they are just tired of being threatened and have decided now is the time to do what they needed to do a long time ago.

It's really too bad hezbollah and terrorists in general use innocent civilians as shields but that's the difference between good and evil.

[August]

August you don't realize that there's a difference between, on the one hand, partisan/ideological "sources" (be they "left" or "right") such as Powerline, Democratic Underground, Little Green Footballs, Daily Kos, and Jihad Watch vs Reuters and the BBC? You think they are all the same?
These are not sources Scandium, they are reporting organizations. There's a difference. It's their sources that i am questioning. I've yet to see hard numbers from any of them which distinguish between combatants and civilians on the Arab side. Like i said, the 3000 Palestinians killed you mentioned earlier could have been actually 2990 Hamas fighters and 10 civilians, or for that matter all Hamas fighters. The bottom line is we don't know.

What we DO know however is that the PLO, Hamas and Hezbollah deliberately put their own non combatants into the line of fire, just as they deliberately attack civilians in order to drive up the civilian body count and horrify the world into condemning Israel. That tells me to suspect any numbers that come from them, especially when they are used in debates regarding Israels disproportionate response.

[scandium]

Originally Posted by scandium
I do not believe the Jews are evil, nor have I ever said anything remotely resembling that. The actions of the Israeli government, and its military, I certainly do believe to be immoral, disproportionate, counter productive, and ultimately futile. And that I have said repeatedly.

Democracies are governments where the people as a whole - hold political power. It may be exercised by them (direct democracy), or through representatives chosen by them (representative democracy).

In a round about way you are saying that everyone who participates in Isreali political process (Jew, Arab, Christian, Other) are immoral, disproportionate, counter productive, and ultimately futile.

I'm not saying that, you are. Funny too, seeing as you're only just back and trying to start these word games with me already; yet nothing has changed since your last visit as I'm not still gonna play them with you.

[waste gate]

scandium,

Just responding to your previous argument. I thought I was being fair.
I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt regarding your feelings about Jews.
I'm just pointing toward the way democracies work, and by extension, what I perceive your comment to mean. No word games. I thought you'd enjoy the subtlety.

Regarding my hiatus (cooling off period, banishment), aren't you glad I'm back?
:D :D :D :D :D

P.S I enjoy your/my role as a foil.

foil
2 a : to prevent from attaining an end :

[scandium]

I'd venture to bet that none of us here know what kind of intelligence the Israelis have and why they've used the amount of force that we've witnessed, and it's easy to expect things to be so one sided given the overwhelming strength which the Israeli forces have over their enemy.

The Israeli's response to what happened to their soldiers may seem disproportionate but maybe it will make the terrorists think twice about messing with them next time. Plus I think they are just tired of being threatened and have decided now is the time to do what they needed to do a long time ago.

It's really too bad hezbollah and terrorists in general use innocent civilians as shields but that's the difference between good and evil.
Hmm... some facts:

Number of Israeli soldiers killed by Hezbollah Guerrilas: 37
Number of Hezbollah Guerrilas killed by Israel Defence forces (IDF): 46+

Those are legitimate targets by both parties. But then look a little deeper and we see this:

Number of Israeli civilians killed by Hezbollah: 19
Number of Lebanese civilians killed by the IDF: 477 confirmed, hundreds more missing or trapped under rubble with estimates exceeding 860

But lets just stick to facts. Hezbollah, the cowardly terrorist group that deliberately targets civilians, has actually killed 37 soldiers and 19 civilians; the noble IDF, which uses precision weaponry and takes pains to avoid killing civilians, has killed 10-20 Lebanese civilians for every Hezbollah they've killed, and 20-40 Lebanese civilians for every Israeli civilian killed by Hezbollah.

Then there's the "collateral damage" they've inflicted upon Lebanon and the 4 million people who live there:

900,000+ civilians displaced as war refugees;
More than 60 bridges and 70 roads destroyed;
Beirut International airport, all national runways, and major ports bombed;
Electrical power plants bombed and related fuel tanks destroyed;
Complete destruction of all runways;
More than 20 gas and fuel stations destroyed;
Thousands of civilian houses destroyed;
Bombing of TV and radio stations;
Bombing of red cross ambulances, government emergency centers, and UN peacekeeping forces;
Complete destruction of industrial factories worth at least $180 million.

Those are just highlights. But I grow weary of posting info that falls on deaf ears; you talk of "good" vs "evil", look at that list above and tell me where - beyond the 46 Hezbollah members at the top, you see evil? Are the 4 million Lebanese evil? Or just the ones that are Muslim (1/3rd of Lebanon is Christian)? Or maybe they are all evil because most of them are "dirty Arabs, sand ******s, and towel heads" as some here have referred to anyone in the ME (outside the Jewish state of Israel)?

Having grown up across the street from a Christian Lebanese family (the eldest daughter of which was my sister's best friend) I heard much of the Beirut, Lebanon that was once the "Jewel of the Middle East" and the hell it was turned into and which she grew up in during the Lebanese civil war, which her family fled to Canada from. So maybe too often I think of them and the stories I heard as a kid when I read about this "collateral damage" and find a more personal element in it; and maybe this is why jingoistic garbage like "human sandbags" and the struggle between "good vs. evil" is among the most retarded stuff I've read too often here. That and the calls to nuke the entire ME I've seen in other threads; same garbage, different posters.

So again I will have to bow out of this discussion for a while as I've reached my tolerance for now of how much spew I can listen to from people who walk amongst me as though they too were civilized people.

[waste gate]

Sound like war numbers. However, non of your well reseached statistics would have occured if Hezballa (part of the Leboneze Gov't) not crossed into Isreali territory, via an underground tunnel, killed eight IDF members and taken two hostage.

A report ealierer in the week (I cannot find it now) purported a Senior Hezballa source as saying they did not expect the reaction which Isreal has mounted.

My question is, why after Isreal's withdrawal from Lebenon, Hezballa's election to the Leboneze Gov't, and numerous 'peace agreements' since 1973, this part of the world continues to be the most devisive and war like places on the face of the earth?

[P_Funk]

Sound like war numbers. However, non of your well reseached statistics would have occured if Hezballa (part of the Leboneze Gov't) not crossed into Isreali territory, via an underground tunnel, killed eight IDF members and taken two hostage.

A report ealierer in the week (I cannot find it now) purported a Senior Hezballa source as saying they did not expect the reaction which Isreal has mounted.

My question is, why after Isreal's withdrawal from Lebenon, Hezballa's election to the Leboneze Gov't, and numerous 'peace agreements' since 1973, this part of the world continues to be the most devisive and war like places on the face of the earth?
Wanna know why it never changes? Because you don't have a clue why and there are 100 years of history there to tell you. The reason nothing changes is because literally nothing changes! Israel continues every 20 years to pound the Lebanese people and their infrsstructure into submission. Every 20 years the Israelis cry foul and pretend to be the noble victims of a heinous crime. The problem is it is perpetually a "us vs. them" conflict. Its always "good vs. evil". These aren't human beings we're dealing with. No. The state actors are just Jews and Muslims. The Israeli politicians and the Muslim terrorists don't recognize human beings. It's just wicked Jews and dirty Muslims depending on whose side you're on. And in between are the people who have been caught in between since war was first waged in the earliest days of civilization. The Jews don't care about the Muslims and the Muslims don't care about the Jews. The hate between them is so long enduring that they don't have enough time to forget.

This is why the Jews don't mind killing Lebanese civilians. They have no value as human beings to them. If they did they wouldn't be bombing children's homes. Hezbollah doesn't care about Jewish people because they have been bombed by the Jews since they were children. The mutual hate has blinded them to the realities of why they are fighting.

That said I don't think it justifies anything. What makes Hezbollah any different from Israel? It's not that Hezbollah is a terrorist group, it's that Israel is not. Israel is a democratic nation. It is a member of the Un and supposedly a civilized society. Know what else is different? Hezbollah came into existance at the end of the Israeli occupation of Lebanon 20 years ago. Israel has existed for decades longer. Israel has seen this battle many times and has still not learned from the outcomes.

Why is Hezbollah here today? Because Israel created them. The devastation left after the last occupation made the roots for Hezbollah. The crippled state of the Lebanese government made it easy for Hezbollah to become more than just a geurilla army in the south. Hezbollah filled the void left after the Lebanese government could not support its people. Why was the Lebanese government cippled? Because Israel wanted them that way. Because Israel was afraid that the Lebanese government would attack them if they were stronger. So what happened? Some angry Lebanese people decided to make their own army.

If you push people around long enough they will find a way to fight back. If you destroy people's way of life what have they left to lose? If israel repeatedly chooses to annihilate the Lebanese industrial complex instead of making concessions towards peace then what choice does a man have left? I'm not condoning terrorism. But can you blame these people for being so angry and fed up? This didn't start 3 weeks ago. This started before thew terrorists that Israel is fighting were born. So they came into this world hating Israel. They came into this world watching their homes and their countrymen suffering and dying because Israel fears for it's hegemony. They also saw that their government couldn't do anything to save them. So what should a young angry man do when he sees his world being attacked constantly by an enemy that he can't understand? He finds a gun and some friends to fight with.

So Israel has said it. No peace without violence. Israel has made life untenable for Lebanon. Israel is the wealthy state player here. They are not equal victims to Lebanon. They are not suffering hardship compared to Lebanon. They are not even threatened with destruction. As if the largest cache of American ordnance and military technology outside of the USA would be at risk of anything. The few israelis who have died are nothing in comparison to the many in lebanon who have died not only in the last few weeks but in the many smaller less publically known incidents. Lebanon has hardly had the chance to recover before it is being laid to waste again. And the irony is that Israel doesn't even recognize their part in creating Hezbollah.

Hezbollah came out of the destruction of 20 years ago. And here today Israel is recreating that destruction in the name of destroying that which it created through the same process. If you want peace with lebanon start treating them like human beings. But Israel doesn't want to. Israel cries a foul and says "we" are victims and makes a token gesture to lebanon.

I seriously doubt that hezbollah will be destroyed by this conflict. The social considerations aside this isn't even correct military doctrine. You can't destroy a geurilla army by using conventional warfare. Bombing infrastructure doesn't destroy an army which exists because of a lack of infrastructure. And bombing a rocket site won't work cause the rockets are fired by people who move around. This isn't a campaign to destroy Hezbollah. It is a compaign to destroy Lebanon because Israel thinks that lebanon is complicit with Hezbollah. As Israel has already said "anyone left in the south is a terrorist". Israel can't think that conventional bombs will destroy Hezbbollah. The US learned that in Vietnam and the USSR learned it in Afganistan. It is a basic doctrinal fact.

So why wont this conflict change anything? Because it is a repetition of the same thing we have seen for decades. If you try to force the people of Lebanon to acquiesce through violence and devastation you will not get submission. You will get violence. You will get resistance and you will get as little mercy as you give them. If Israel wont start treating the Lebanese like human beings then this will never end. Why is it on Israel to change it? Because Israel has wealth, Israel has power, Israel is not devastated. Israel is the one who is levelling cities, polluting coastal waters, and Israel is the one who is creating a new generation of terrorists at this very moment. Those who have the ability to effect change have the obligation if they want peace. Lebanon has no power, Israel has seen to that.

All this doesn't answer the question of how to get Hezbollah to change. But you can be assured that destroying lebanon, again, won't achieve this end. Killing those whose blood drove Hezbollah into existance in the first place won't end their reign. Even if Hezbollah is somehow brought to heel that won't end the mutual hatred that has existed unending. So it will continue.

[waste gate]

Thank you P_Funk for replying for scandium, i'm sure he will apreciate it.

My question was: why after Isreal's withdrawal from Lebenon, Hezballa's election to the Leboneze Gov't, and numerous 'peace agreements' since 1973, this part of the world continues to be the most devisive and war like places on the face of the earth?

Wanna know why it never changes? Because you don't have a clue why and there are 100 years of history there to tell you.

Isreal, to the best of my knowledge has only been a state since 1947, hardly one hundred years

Seems to me that Isreal has acted in good faith to remove itself from both Lebenon and Gaza. I could be wrong, but please can you answer the question?

The reason as to why Hezballa doesn't want to back down doesn't seem any more peaceful than Isreal's.

[Skybird]

Skybird,

To post those pictures on a site like this that includes among its members young teenagers is in very poor taste, at a minimum. To then further use them to claim that they have been somehow fabricated or staged is even lower - have you no shame at all?
And that they may have been fabricated - is of no concern for you. but it is a growing scandal, making waves in mainstream medias as well now. Several major german newspapers also have claimed there doubts about these storiesyou know, l expected exactly this and absolutely no other reaction from you. But go on - shoot the messenger, and your queer reality is saved.

[Fish]

Number of Israeli civilians killed by Hezbollah: 19

Scandium, what do think the number should be hezbolla was able to steer there missiles more precise?

[P_Funk]

Isreal, to the best of my knowledge has only been a state since 1947, hardly one hundred years
You pove then that you know nothing of history. Israel is a product of Western influence in the Middle East. There would be no Israel without the Balfour declaration and no Israel if Britain and the US hadn't formed it from the remnants of the British Empire. In fact without Britain and the US constantly for the last 47 years Israel never could have survived. It is an artificial state created by the west. The west funds Israel's military and it funded it's economic survival. Now I'm not here to argue the point of whether Israel should have been created. That is just going to kill the point. The fact is that Israel is here now and they deserve to exist just like everyone else.

However Israel is only an extention of the Western interference in the Middle East. Israel is continuing to behave just as any western nation. The West, meaning the white people mainly from Britain and the US, have entered the Middle East many times and declared that they were going to save it. many times they have tried to "pacify" small corners, bring "democracy" to them. The modern experience in Iraq had been done before. And the conflict betwee Israel and its neighbours continues because Israel's attitute is unchanged. Do you think that Israel would be able to do what it is doing without the personal veto of the US? No other nation on earth could get away with what israel is doing. Israel is being backed by the West and so the West is still meddling. There is no balance opf power in the Mid East. The US and britain keep trying to tip it absurdly in their favour. The US is fighting it's proxy war with iran and Hezbollah and Israel, though not proxies, are continuing anyway to do as the West wants them to.

There can be no democracy and peace in the Mid East so loing as the West continues to play big brother. Israel could not behave in such a violent and impulsive manner without both the military and political support of the US. This is why it never changes.

[Yahoshua]

Well....you have some idea of the situation P_funk, but I don't think you've quite seen the whole picture. And there are more than enough posts before this one to explain that point, and if you still hold that view after reading the other posts please explain to us why that is.

And to Scandium over there, I'm presenting an Editorial that will help explain a few points and make a few questions on my behalf.

IS THE WORLD PRESS ANTI-ISRAEL OR JUST ANTI-SEMITIC?

LETTER FROM RUTH MATAR (WOMEN IN GREEN) JERUSALEM
August 3, 2006


Dear Friends,

Israel is fighting for its very survival as it is attacked by the terrorist group Hamas from the south (Gaza), and by the terrorist group Hizbullah from the north (Lebanon). A third front has been opened within Israel, as well, with continual threats of suicide attacks in the major cities, and shootings on the roads within Israel.

Predictably, whenever civilians are accidentally killed in Lebanon, there is a veritable "hate Israel, blame Israel" in the world media.

Jews who are killed by Hizbullah rocket attacks (rockets are supplied by Iran, and ferried across Syria) don't evoke much media interest.

Take UN Security General Koffi Annan as an example. When four UNTSO observers were killed by an air-strike on a UN post in Lebanon on July 25, he claimed without any proof that it was INTENTIONAL. However, one of the officers killed, Maj. Paeta Hess-von Kruedene had previously complained in emails that Hizbullah fighters were all over his position. "They use the UN as shields knowing that they can't be punished for it," he wrote.

So, how about an apology, Koffi Annan?

Then on Saturday, July 29, the tragedy at Kfar Qana occurred. The world press has a veritable orgy blaming Israel for the many civilian deaths. Some examples:

LA REPUBLICA (Rome) "Lebanon, massacre of children"

THE GUARDIAN (Britain) "They found them huddled together"

CNN "Israel agreed to temporarily cease air-strikes in South Lebanon, a day after 52 people were killed, many of them sleeping children, when Israel war planes bombarded the Lebanese village of Qana, triggering global outrage and warnings of retributions for alleged 'war crimes'".

(By the way, CNN "Senior International Correspondent" Nic Robertson admitted that an anti-Israel report from Beruit on July 18 about civilian casualties in Lebanon was stage-managed from start to finish by Hizbullah).

What really happened at Qana? A Lebanese website blames Hizbullah for Qana deaths.

Knowing full well that Israel will not hesitate to bombard civilian targets, Hizbullah gunmen placed a rocket launcher on the roof in Qana and brought disabled children inside, in a bid to provoke a response by the Israeli Air Force (YNET, August 1, 2006).

How come no one is investigating that the building in question only collapsed EIGHT HOURS AFTER THE ISRAELI ATTACK? Why weren't the "children" evacuated and brought to hospitals immediately after the air strike? Why wait eight hours?

Headline in today's Jerusalem Post: Number of Qana dead half of original estimates. Why was the number of dead at Qana so grossly exaggerated by the entire world media?

In fact, a former CIA Director thinks the whole Qana tragedy may have been a Hizbullah setup.

It certainly is predictable that all this violent distortion by the media will lead to Jews being attacked and even murdered. This has already happened in the U.S. at a Seattle Jewish Center last week.

Whatever the world media dishes out, take it with a grain of salt.

Please don't fail to read the following article by Naomi Ragen.



Cry to those Using Babies as Sheilds
By Naomi Ragen


My son is in the army. He is not the type at all, believe me. Quiet, studious, a writer, a lover of Jewish history, Talmud, ethics. He spent two years in a pre-army program in the Galilee called Karmei Chayil. He made many good friends there from all over the country, and now he and all his friends are in the army. One of them I know well. A bit chubby, with payot, and a great laugh. He and my son have become like brothers. While both of them tried out for the elite paratroopers unit, only he made it in. He and his unit are the ones in Lebanon. They were there over a week, fighting under horrific conditions, running out of food and water. Even though the Israeli airforce dropped tons of leaflets warning civilians to flee because they were in terrorist territory and likely to be injured, they still
encountered civilians. My son spoke to his friend yesterday,and this is how he described it:

"The village looked empty, and then we heard noises coming from one of the houses, so we opened fire. But when we went inside, we found two women and a child huddled in the corner of the room. We were so relieved we hadn't hurt them. We took up base in one of the empty houses. And then all of a sudden, we came under intense fire. Three rockets were fired at the house we were in. Only one managed to destroy a wall, which fell on one of us, covering him in white dust, but otherwise not hurting him. I spent the whole time feeding bullets to my friend who was shooting non-stop. We managed to killed 26 terrorists. Not one of
us was hurt. Our commanding officer kept walking around, touching everybody on the shoulder, smiling and encouraging us: "We're are better than they are. Don't worry." It calmed us all down. And really, we were much better then them. They are a lousy army. They only win when they hide behind baby carriages."

Please remember this when you hear about the "atrocity" of the Israeli bomb dropped on Kfar Cana, killing many civilians, a place from which Hezbollah has fired hundreds of rockets at Israel. Unlike previous administrations, Mr. Olmert has my respect when he says: "They were warned to leave. It is the responsibility of Hezbollah for firing rockets amidst civilians."

Terrorists and their supporters have lost the right to complain about civilian casualties, since all they have done this entire war is target civilians. Every single one of the
more than 2,500 rockets launched into Israel, is launched into populated towns filled with women and children. Just today, another suicide belt meant to kill civilians in Israel was detonated harmlessly by our forces in Nablus. So don't cry to me about civilian casualties. Cry to those using your babies and wives and mothers; cry to those who store weapons in mosques, ambulances, hospitals, and private homes. Cry to those launching deadly rockets from the backyards of your kindergartens and schools. Cry to the heartless men who love death, and however many of their troops or civilians die, consider themselves victorious as
long as they can keep on firing rockets at our women and children.

Save your sympathy for the mothers and sisters and girlfriends of our young soldiers who would rather be sitting in study halls learning Torah, but have no choice but to risk their precious lives full of hope, goodness and endless potential, to wipe out the cancerous terrorist cells that threaten their people and all mankind. Make your choice, and save your tears.

That terrorists have been unsuccessful in killing more of our women and children is due to our army, God and prayers, not to any lack of motivation or intention on their part. If you hide behind your baby to shoot at my baby, you are responsible for getting children killed. You and you alone.


* * *


With Blessings and Love for Israel,

Ruth Matar

[waste gate]

Isreal, to the best of my knowledge has only been a state since 1947, hardly one hundred years
You pove then that you know nothing of history. Israel is a product of Western influence in the Middle East. There would be no Israel without the Balfour declaration and no Israel if Britain and the US hadn't formed it from the remnants of the British Empire. In fact without Britain and the US constantly for the last 47 years Israel never could have survived. It is an artificial state created by the west. The west funds Israel's military and it funded it's economic survival. Now I'm not here to argue the point of whether Israel should have been created. That is just going to kill the point. The fact is that Israel is here now and they deserve to exist just like everyone else.

However Israel is only an extention of the Western interference in the Middle East. Israel is continuing to behave just as any western nation. The West, meaning the white people mainly from Britain and the US, have entered the Middle East many times and declared that they were going to save it. many times they have tried to "pacify" small corners, bring "democracy" to them. The modern experience in Iraq had been done before. And the conflict betwee Israel and its neighbours continues because Israel's attitute is unchanged. Do you think that Israel would be able to do what it is doing without the personal veto of the US? No other nation on earth could get away with what israel is doing. Israel is being backed by the West and so the West is still meddling. There is no balance opf power in the Mid East. The US and britain keep trying to tip it absurdly in their favour. The US is fighting it's proxy war with iran and Hezbollah and Israel, though not proxies, are continuing anyway to do as the West wants them to.

There can be no democracy and peace in the Mid East so loing as the West continues to play big brother. Israel could not behave in such a violent and impulsive manner without both the military and political support of the US. This is why it never changes.

Thanks for the reply P_Funk,
I do know something of history. Was my major it was. But Isreal has only existed as a state since 1947. I didn't ask about past or future influences. Let's live in the now shall we?


fact without Britain and the US constantly for the last 47 years Israel never could have survived.

Neither would Europe nor Japan nor much of the Muslum world. This is a spurious argument.


The US is fighting it's proxy war with iran and Hezbollah and Israel, though not proxies, are continuing anyway to do as the West wants them to.



So you are saying that nations should not do what are in their best interests?


Israel could not behave in such a violent and impulsive manner without both the military and political support of the US. This is why it never changes.


You are correct. Without the support of other democracies the state of Isreal, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Spain etc., would fall and all of humanity would be subject to the religion of peace. No more internet, no more divorce, no more abortion, no more modern medicine. We would certainly have plenty of oil, but no way to convert it into a usable commodity.

Women would be the property of their husbands, who could do with them as they like. The Quran would be the law and all of humanity would, except the choesen few, would be subject to Sharia. Culturally, socially and economically these peple are living in the 9th century. Thats where their so called leaders want them.

I'm sorry but given the choice, I choose the western democracies

[Ducimus]

You all have way too much time on your hands. :88)

[scandium]

Scandium, what do think the number should be hezbolla was able to steer there missiles more precise?
Zero. On both sides.

[waste gate]

Zero. On both sides.

Then release the hostages.

[P_Funk]

Your ignorance is impressive waste gate. So you say you're a history major but you also simultaneously reject the importance of historical context in order to understand the so called "here and now". To understand the Middle East you have to read history. You can't say it's in the moment. Nothing is in the moment. The present in brought on by the past. In political matter especially. To say that the past is irrelavent is a rash and wholly unintellectual assesment.

You also say that my argument regarding the artificial support of Israel by the West is "spurious". You can't compare the entire world to Israel. Canada nor Britain don't need the US to survive. Israel was a wasteland, a flat empty desert with no ability to support a nation of millions. If the US and Britain hadn't funded the entire project of irrigation and defense then Israel never would have survived. You cannot say then so quickly that the argument that the West is directly involved in Middle East conflicts through their artificial inception and continued support of the nation of Israel is irrelavent. It is in fact at the heart of this current conflict. Like i said. Without US support Israel would have to be much more diplomatic in it's behavior.

However I detect a very blatant anti-muslim sentiment from you. You seem to believe that Islam means the end of civilization. People talk about anti-Israeli biases. What about the anti-muslims? You and many others continue to inflate this into a fight for civilization. But these are just people. People who have been subjected to the worst treatment by the Western world for the last century and beyond. And the extremists do not account for the bulk of a religion's system of belief. One could just as easily say that Christianity are the same way. If the Christians rule the world there will be no abortion, divorce, blacks will be enslaved and women forced back into the home. Or the Jews! No more pork, forced fasts, a terrible plague of batmizvahs for all of your friend's children, having to buy expensive gifts for kids every few weeks. It is absurd to imply that if Israel doesn't **** kick Lebanon today that tommorow the world will be one big Islamic extremist theocracy.

And I have a hint for you. The US is not the great savior of freedom in the world. The US has no interest in spreading democracy and freedom. The US is only interested in its own well being and is quite happy to subvert the righteous causes of other peoples if it suits them. There are too many examples to note. Being a history major you shouldn't need any help finding them. But honestly. Don't be so prejudiced. It hurts your intellect and certainly makes you look less credible.

[scandium]

Skybird,

To post those pictures on a site like this that includes among its members young teenagers is in very poor taste, at a minimum. To then further use them to claim that they have been somehow fabricated or staged is even lower - have you no shame at all? And that they may have been fabricated - is of no concern for you. but it is a growing scandal, making waves in mainstream medias as well now. Several major german newspapers also have claimed there doubts about these storiesyou know, l expected exactly this and absolutely no other reaction from you. But go on - shoot the messenger, and your queer reality is saved.

Really? What mainstream media? The blogs and Little Green Footballs you linked to? Is that your "mainstream" reality, or just your reality no matter how unreal?

You think I hadn't seen those pictures before - and dozens just like them? Yeah I had, but via websites where the writer had the decency to post them as links, with a warning of what the link showed, rather than in the body of the message like you did. So when I first saw them I had an inkling of what to prepare myself to see, unlike seeing them out of the blue this morning here while eating my freakin' breakfast. That was bad enough. Your parroting of the usual garbage from LGF claiming they were staged was just rotten.

You know there are lots of sites out there saying that the moon landings were a hoax too and the photos staged - do you buy into that too Skybird? Maybe you do, they are just as whacked out and nutty as the folks at LGF and yet you still swallow their load of bunk daily too.

[waste gate]

It hurts your intellect and certainly makes you look less credible.

This kind of comment, less diplomatically given, put me in the penalty box for a couple of days.

I'll be watching to see if you receive the same discipline. Gizzmo?

Give me a few moments to digest the ant-western screed and I'll be back to ya.

[scandium]

12 Official Guidelines for the Israeli Spokesman in Time of War:

The Israeli Foreign Ministry urges the Israeli lobbyists around the world as well as its representatives to spread the message below. This war is all about our survival unlike all the other wars that were all about our survival. We must to stand up firmly and tell the world that:

*Our army is the most humanist army in the world.

*Our army always informs the helpless victims before we drop tonnes of bombs on their heads.

*Is there any other army in the world that spreads leaflets before it commits genocide?

*As if this isn’t enough, we always 'deeply regret’ after we’ve committed atrocities.

*Didn’t we 'sincerely apologise’ after smoking four UN peacekeepers?

*Unlike, the Hamas and the Hezbollah, we never kill indiscriminately. We always kill very discriminately. We kill Arabs whether they are Arab women, Arab elders, Arab children, Arab refugees, Arab disabled hiding in a Red Cross shelter in Kafar Quana. We are after Arabs and to speak about us as if we are bombing and killing indiscriminately is an utter anti-Semitic lie.

*Lebanese Prime Minister Siniora must be very happy with our brutal assault against his people. Let’s face it, we are doing his job, we are killing the baddies. We are cleaning his streets. Indeed we start with the Hezbollah, but we will then take the war to Syria and Iran. We have it all planned with our friends in the Pentagon. We can’t really understand why PM Siniora is making such a fuss insisting on ceasefire. Indeed, a third of the Lebanese civilians are now displaced, but as you all know, in war **** happens (especially in the Israeli wars).

*We the Israelis are at the forefront of the fight for democracy and humanism. You European and Westerners should support us. We are engaged in a dirty war you fail to fight. Is it a coincidence that Tony, George and Condy gave us a green light to bring Lebanon back to the Stone Age? Is it a coincidence that the Andrea’le Merkel sent us 3 Submarines as soon as she settled in office? Let’s face it, you all love us, and you better admit it, you love us strong and murderous. You all give us the green light to paint the region in red. And let me tell you, we love painting in red, moreover, we are really good at it.

*And don’t you ever forget, we are the only democracy in the Middle East, when we engage in one war crime or another, when we breach the Geneva Convention, when we violate any possible humanist call, we always express our people’s democratic choice. We always do it in the name of our people. Don’t you forget, this war was launched by an Israeli national unity centrist coalition. This war is the call of the moderate peace-seeking Jewish voice. Unlike the Hezbollah, a tiny group of a paramilitary militias, our terror is nothing but state terrorism in its making. Our state terrorism is our democratic choice and it is supported by the world’s leading democrats: Bush and Blair.

*Unlike the cowards Hamas and Hezbollah who hide behind women and children, we are brave, heroic and technologically superior; we successfully target the women, the elders and the children who may or may not serve the Islamic terrorists as human shields. We smoke them and them alone. We obviously believe in focussed assassination.

*Although we clearly punish the Arabs for the crimes committed against us by the Nazis, we are humanists, we never behave like the Nazis, we never schlep innocent Arabs in trains, we never ship them to death camps, we never gas them, instead, with the support of our American Brother, we bring the death directly to them, we kill them in their homes, in their beds sometime just before dawn when they are still in pyjamas.

*In short, not only we are humanists, we are the notion of humanism. To doubt it is nothing but pure and crude anti-Semitism.

This message must be repeated time after time even if it doesn’t make much sense. It is a message that must be circulated regardless of its truth value. This war is not about truth, it is about the right of the Jewish people to exist in peace.
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=4907

[P_Funk]

How is that a bad comment waste gate? To say that being prejudiced is bad when it comes to arguing? If thats against the rules then I don't know what the rules are.

[waste gate]

[/quote]You can't compare the entire world to Israel. Canada nor Britain don't need the US to survive. Israel was a wasteland, a flat empty desert with no ability to support a nation of millions.[/quote]

OK, then why other than the destruction of Judism does anyone want the land?

As far as not comparing the 'entire world' to Isreal, I'm not speaking in a micro-cosm sense, more along the lines of the world as you and I know it.


However I detect a very blatant anti-muslim sentiment from you.


That is hard not to dismiss. After all 3000 of my fellow citizens were killed by the organization of a man (he claimed responsibility) who quotes the quran and uses it as his motivation, in his attack on my countrymen. The quaran, not the injustices upon his people.

And I have a hint for you. No hint required.
The US is only interested in its own well being and is quite happy to subvert the righteous causes of other peoples if it suits them.

OK. As long as my elected officials live within the bounds of why I elected them.
Unfortunately if you are born in the Quaran you have no choice between which dictator you succumb to.

[scandium]

That is hard not to dismiss. After all 3000 of my fellow citizens were killed by the organization of a man (he claimed responsibility) who quotes the quran and uses it as his motivation, in his attack on my countrymen. The quaran, not the injustices upon his people.
Wonder why he chose as his targets the World Trade Center and the Pentagon eh? Couldn't be anything symbolic about those targets could there? If its your freedom he hates, why not hit the Statue of Liberty?

But maybe there's something in the Koran everyone else has missed that instructs all 1.2 billion Muslims around the world to blow up the WTC and the Pentagon on 9/11/01... funny that only 19 took up the call if that's the case though.

But hey, let's not introduce logic and reason into this when there could very well be some Koran carrying boogeyman hiding under your bed.

[Edit] As a side note, how many Muslims in Iraq have your countryman killed, or been responsible for the deaths of, just since say ... the ceasefire following the Persian Gulf War?

Well by any measure at least 50,000 just in the current conflict but just as likely over 100,000 - but who knows? As one of your Generals noted "we don't do body counts".

Then there's this as well:

"It’s a hard choice, but I think, we, think, it’s worth it." -- Madeleine Albright on the over 500,000 children dead as the result of Iraqi sanctions.

[P_Funk]

I'm sorry but that whole post was a load nonsense.

Firstly, why do people want the land? Because the Palestinians had their land taken away from them. Also for the same reason the Jews want it so do the Muslims. It's called religious significance. And that doesn't change the facts that I'm bringing forward. You're trying to disprove my argument by making light of a different detail. Regardless of why they want it it was a waste land. The US and Britain funded Israel's survival. You can't deny that. Israel is a product of Western care. And for that reason Israel is often perceived, and rightly so, as being a western influence on the Mid East. I'm not saying that Israel doesn't act in it's own self interest, or what they believe might be that self interest, but that the US has a very string influence over Israel and thus has power in the Mid East. Not to mention the fact that Israel gets its formidable arsenal from the US.


OK. As long as my elected officials live within the bounds of why I elected them.
Unfortunately if you are born in the Quaran you have no choice between which dictator you succumb to. What does that mean? That isn't really an answer. I'm trying to make a point and I'm not even sure how that's supposed to make me look wrong. Or is this your emergency escape option; the "I don't give a crap" argument? You implied that the US is keeping the world from becoming a muslim theocracy. I'm saying the US is doing more damage globally to freedom and democracy than anyone else. I still haven't heard your counter. Or have you none?

As for your bias citing grief as an excuse does nothing to make you more credible. And if 3000 of your fellow citizens were slain by a man touting religious rhetoric what about those poor muslims that have been traumatized? They see their hom,es and families killed while hearing the empty words of Israel speaking of peace and a free Lebanon. You have no right to condemn these people and then say you have a right to be angry. If anyone has a reason to be angry it's the Lebanese and guess what. They are. It might help you understand why things are the way they are.

[Yahoshua]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060803/ap_on_re_mi_ea/lebanon_israel

[scandium]

OK. As long as my elected officials live within the bounds of why I elected them. Unfortunately if you are born in the Quaran you have no choice between which dictator you succumb to.

And which dictator do the tens of thousands of Muslims "born in the Quaran" here in Canada ever year live under? I might not have voted for our current PM but I certainly wouldn't call him a "dictator". :lol:

[waste gate]

I'm sorry but that whole post was a load nonsense.

Firstly, why do people want the land? Because the Palestinians had their land taken away from them. Also for the same reason the Jews want it so do the Muslims. It's called religious significance. And that doesn't change the facts that I'm bringing forward. You're trying to disprove my argument by making light of a different detail. Regardless of why they want it it was a waste land. The US and Britain funded Israel's survival. You can't deny that. Israel is a product of Western care. And for that reason Israel is often perceived, and rightly so, as being a western influence on the Mid East. I'm not saying that Israel doesn't act in it's own self interest, or what they believe might be that self interest, but that the US has a very string influence over Israel and thus has power in the Mid East. Not to mention the fact that Israel gets its formidable arsenal from the US.


OK. As long as my elected officials live within the bounds of why I elected them.



Unfortunately if you are born in the Quaran you have no choice between which dictator you succumb to. What does that mean? That isn't really an answer. I'm trying to make a point and I'm not even sure how that's supposed to make me look wrong. Or is this your emergency escape option; the "I don't give a crap" argument? You implied that the US is keeping the world from becoming a muslim theocracy. I'm saying the US is doing more damage globally to freedom and democracy than anyone else. I still haven't heard your counter. Or have you none?

As for your bias citing grief as an excuse does nothing to make you more credible. And if 3000 of your fellow citizens were slain by a man touting religious rhetoric what about those poor muslims that have been traumatized? They see their hom,es and families killed while hearing the empty words of Israel speaking of peace and a free Lebanon. You have no right to condemn these people and then say you have a right to be angry. If anyone has a reason to be angry it's the Lebanese and guess what. They are. It might help you understand why things are the way they are.

What does that mean? That isn't really an answer. I'm trying to make a point and I'm not even sure how that's supposed to make me look wrong.


Was I trying to make you look wrong? What is your point?



They see their hom,es and families killed while hearing the empty words of Israel speaking of peace and a free Lebanon.


In 2000 the Isreali army abandoned Lebenon. It then becomes incumbent upon Lebenon to enforce its borders and restrain hezballa from entering Isreali territory for any reason.


As for your bias citing grief as an excuse does nothing to make you more credible.


It has nothing to do with grief in my mind. I has to do with an attack upon a soverign nation under the auspices of the nation of Islam. I've often regretted our president's retraction of the term 'crusade'. If Islam can use the term Jihad, why can't the west use crusade in the furterance of its objectives?

I hope that clears it up for ya.

[scandium]

It has nothing to do with grief in my mind. I has to do with an attack upon a soverign nation under the auspices of the nation of Islam. I've often regretted our president's retraction of the term 'crusade'. If Islam can use the term Jihad, why can't the west use crusade in the furterance of its objectives?

I hope that clears it up for ya.
If you feel that way then why are you posting here when you should be strapping on the sword and taking the battle to any of the many hotspots in the ME. You all hat no cattle? Just another flag waving keyboard commando who glorifies in the death and destruction being waged by others while you sit behind your monitor and talk tough?

Yeah I thought so. Its all well and good as long as its someone else doing the fighting somewhere else but the day your country re-instituted the draft you'd be on the first plane to Canada. And should that day ever come I hope we send you right back, because times have changed since the Vietnam days and you'll find we're no longer so welcoming of your draft dodgers.

[P_Funk]

All for waste gate.

Was I trying to make you look wrong? What is your point? Well why are you answering me? I thought we having a disagreement?

In 2000 the Isreali army abandoned Lebenon. It then becomes incumbent upon Lebenon to enforce its borders and restrain hezballa from entering Isreali territory for any reason.
And what about the fact that Israel ensured that the Lebanese givernment and its military was sufficiently weak so that they could not invade Israel (or defnd their own borders). After Israel's occupation Lebanon was crippled. It started to get better. Then this happened. Regardless of the actions of a military group beyond the control of the Lebanese government destroying the infrastructure that led to hezbollahs existance is not a way to ensure a stable lebanon. The fact is that Israel was scared of Lebanon invading them. So they ensured that the army and the government were sufficiently weak so as not to be a threat. But in that power vaccuum Hezbollah came in to stabalize Lebanon. Hezbollah isn't just a military organization. They provide social services to the people of the regions they control. They rebuild buildings, including schools and hospitals. Hezbollah pays for children's educations where families cannot afford it. Hezbollah for all intents and purposes is the government of south Lebanon. And why did they achieve such a great position? Because of the impotency of the Lebanese government after the Israeli occupation. You cannot simply say "okay now we're gone so you can come back to being a government again."

And now the Lebanese government are crippled again. Israel has destroyed the infrastructure of Lebanon, the very lifeblood of any bureacracy. With no roads, ports, or airports how can a government operate? Also the economy has been shattered, the coast lines polluted and the population made refugees. Poverty and famine are in many Lebanese citizens futures. This is preciely what lead to hezbollah's power to begin with. Israel is repeating the circle that leads inevitably back to what we are seeing today.

If Islam can use the term Jihad, why can't the west use crusade in the furterance of its objectives? First of all you smear all of those who believe in Islam with the actions of a very few. Would you also like to have every white American associated with the KKK? They speak of religion and America and patriotism. yet they are no more noble than Osama Bin Laden. You are obviously no student of the Middle East if you truly believe that the source of Islamic Terrorism is Islam itself. And you say if they can use a word why can we not? Well you are saying that we ought to be able to do what the terrorists are doing? I thought they were vile evil people. I mean if they are so terrible why should we hasten to replicate their behavior? If their beliefs and rhetoric are inspired by hatred and interpretation of religious texts how is calling the War on Terrorism a Crusade any better than what they call a Jihad? It is this form of rascism which leads to the hatred that fuels anti-American sentiment within the Middle East.

[Yahoshua]

And the same can't be said of you Scandium?

You sit there at a keyboard and whine about the troubles of the conquered but ignore the fact that the counquered are the agressors who started this whole sorry mess. Irregardless of when the modern state of Israel has been established, she owned the land long before any of these Arab squatters arrived.

Rome evicted the people, and now the people are back and guess what! None of the squatters want the landlord back, well neither did Europe. So it's either fight or die. And while you sit there and urge restraint and whine about the Arab children. Where is the same concern for Jewish children? Or are they the agressors simply because they exist?

I and several others have explained to you how things arrived here and yet you still criticize Israel for defending herself.

Would you also criticize the United States for retaliating against Mexico were she sending armed rebels into American territory? (Oh wait, they already are but none of our politicans have the balls to do anything about it without a guarantee that they'll win the next election!!).

Or better yet, how would you feel if American artillery units began randomly shelling Canadian cities. How would you feel? Would you criticize your government for retaliating against American units? What if American citizens were kidnapping Canadians and beheading/torturing them and blackmailing the Canadian government to release hardened murderers from their prisons by the thousands in exchange for a single Canadian citzen? How much is a Canadian worth Scandium? Whats the running rate for them nowadays? And likewise, how much is the life of an Israeli soldier worth?

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Society_&_Culture/prisonerswap012904.html

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Society_&_Culture/pows.html

[waste gate]

welcome back scandium,

I wasn't sure I'd hear from you again, given the demonstrative nature of you last comment towards me.


I'm not saying that, you are. Funny too, seeing as you're only just back and trying to start these word games with me already; yet nothing has changed since your last visit as I'm not still gonna play them with you.


If you feel that way then why are you posting here when you should be strapping on the sword and taking the battle to any of the many hotspots in the ME. You all hat no cattle? Just another flag waving keyboard commando who glorifies in the death and destruction being waged by others while you sit behind your monitor and talk tough?

Perhaps you should have a look at some of the other posts I replied to today.
If you did, you will know that by no means do I think war is a good thing.
I've been asking why a group of people who spend time playing games of war are even discussing the same.

As far as running to Canada, your ancesters did that, not mine and not me.

[TteFAboB]

The 60 body-count is a fraud and a lie.

The topic title must be changed and all who demand proportionality or claim to speak in the name of proportionality must immediately reduce their indignation by 50% porportionally to the real number of casualties.

Here is the number from a vehicle Hizbollah supporters will not discharge, unless they are willing to also drop all their other statistics from the Lebanese government because that is the source:

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/08/02/lebano13899.htm

[Onkel Neal]

Come on, guys. Let's not forget, we are not going to solve the world's problems. Please don't get personal or distressed over opinions.

[SUBMAN1]

Nuke the Hezbollah and nuke this conversation. End of story. Everyone is happier. We go back to our lives and be done with it.

All I read is double standards when it comes to Hezbollah, so if they all died tomorrow, I'd celebrate and not shed a tear.

Isreal sits behind their walls and gets hit with rockets for years on end, yet, its bad to go try and put a stop to that? Too many sympathizers here for what I consider deliberate murders. There is a difference between accidently killing civilians - something that can't be avoided in war time - count the number that died in WWII - to actively targetting and killing civilians as a matter of course. The problem with civilians is that they are an actual military target for any war fighter since if you break the peoples moral, you have won the war.

To add to the fire, the civilians Isreal accidently kills are Hezbollah sympathizers too, so are they actually nuetral in that regard? Can't find any compelling reason to say no, so the answer is yes.

Is Hezbollah even killing the very same people that support them? The answer is yes. They load up the unwanted children of their society, the disabled, and pack them like sardines in a building, and tell them they will be with god soon and that they are doing a good dead, and they are all probably told that they will be on gods right hand side for what they are doing. Hezbollah then puts an empty rocket launcher on the roof and makes the building a target for Israel. :cry: These children have no physical way to leave due to being disabled, and cry and cry and cry for help since they do not want to die! But these murderers have decided for them that they will. The ending is a complete tradgedy.

Anyone that sympathises with Hezbolah, who are child/baby killers are sick and twisted themselves. I can't believe the world doesn't kill them all. The UN should condem them. They should be wiped from the planet.

These are the same people that murder Marines for no reason who were innocent and not at war with anyone. Should we go through their list of crimes? I think it should be pulled and gone through one by one. The children still rings in my minds, but this is not all these murderers have done.

But you know whats best? No matter what I say, or no matter who else says what, Isreal will be killing Hezbollah tomorrow and I will take satisfaction in the fact that their is one less terrorist in the world.

Go on sympathising for the baby killers.

-S

[scandium]

And the same can't be said of you Scandium?
No, it can't, because I don't prostitute myself for the ideologues and the war profiteers - and you can bet a lot of people are making a LOT of money on all this killing in the ME while the rest of us will pay the price, one way or another, with either our tax dollars to finance it or in blowback as more of these people decide they've had enough and decide a little payback is in order.

To me war is always a last resort, never a first resort, and something to be waged only when all other options have been exhausted or there are no other options to be tried.

Does the Israeli-Hezbollah (which is composed of about 5,000 militants) conflict that is being waged in Lebanon at the expense of Lebanon's 4 million people meet this criteria? No, absolutely not because full scale war was the first resort done right on day 1 in reaction to the kidnapping of 2 IDF soldiers, and for that crime the Lebanese people have paid with the lives of over 600 civilian lives, and counting, and the complete destruction of their country. There were other options to be tried first, but they were not even considered.

You sit there at a keyboard and whine about the troubles of the conquered but ignore the fact that the counquered are the agressors who started this whole sorry mess. Irregardless of when the modern state of Israel has been established, she owned the land long before any of these Arab squatters arrived.
Lebanon is not a "conquered" country, it is a sovereign nation and member of the UN just like Israel, thus enjoying the same rights and protections that charter confers to all nations (at least in theory). If you're talking about the Palestinians, that's a separate discussion so let's not confuse the two eh.

Rome evicted the people, and now the people are back and guess what! None of the squatters want the landlord back, well neither did Europe. So it's either fight or die. And while you sit there and urge restraint and whine about the Arab children. Where is the same concern for Jewish children? Or are they the agressors simply because they exist? Oddly that seems to be the arguement used by many here to justify the slaughter of hundreds of Lebanese civilians, women and children included, but maybe you haven't been following the thread. Or maybe you have but believe, as others here seem to, that an Arab is only 1/10th-1/20th human - or at least when measured up against the Jewish civilian, as the IDF's present calculus seems to demonstrate.

I and several others have explained to you how things arrived here and yet you still criticize Israel for defending herself. This is ethnic cleasing of Southern Lebanon and wholesale destruction of the entire country, not self-defence.

Would you also criticize the United States for retaliating against Mexico were she sending armed rebels into American territory? (Oh wait, they already are but none of our politicans have the balls to do anything about it without a guarantee that they'll win the next election!!). Funny but I must have been asleep when Mexico reduced the US to rubble - when did this happen?

Or better yet, how would you feel if American artillery units began randomly shelling Canadian cities. Good question. Probably about the same way I'd feel if the U.S. bombed a house full of Canadian citizens and killed 7 of them, then only a few days later shelled a clearly marked U.N. Outpost - which they had known about for years - after personal reasurances to the U.N. that it would not be targetted but proceeded to shell it 14 times over a 6 hour period even when told, ten times, their fire was endangering the U.N. peace keepers stationed there; and then replied, each time, that they would cease firing but then proceeded to drop a precision bomb on it, killing everyone within including a Canadian peace keeper. Except this is no hypothetical, and it wasn't the Americans or Hezbollah who had done it. It was Israel. And by their own standards, and yours as well which you illustrate here, regarding acts of war and the consequences therein we should already be at war with Israel. But we are not, because ours is a civilized nation whose first reaction is not to begin thrashing about like some angry caveman.

How would you feel? Would you criticize your government for retaliating against American units? See above. Get it yet?

What if American citizens were kidnapping Canadians and beheading/torturing them and blackmailing the Canadian government to release hardened murderers from their prisons by the thousands in exchange for a single Canadian citzen? How much is a Canadian worth Scandium? Whats the running rate for them nowadays? And likewise, how much is the life of an Israeli soldier worth? 8 Canadian citizens killed by the IDF in its response to the kidnapping of 2 IDF soldiers by Hezbollah, so by Israeli calculations I guess that makes a Canadian worth 1/4 that of an Israeli.

Of course, as others here clearly demonstrate, since the7 Canadian civilians bombed were in a war zone they probably deserved it; though we'll have to ignore the fact that when they went there on vacation Lebanon was not a battlefield but a peaceful democracy and that the very first thing the IDF did, probably before these Canadians could even learn they were suddenly in a warzone, was bomb all the routes out and thereby trap them and 16,000+ other Canadians there to be terrorized by Israel's continual shelling and bombing of this small country. And as to the Canadian soldier, well he probably deserved it too even though he was just doing his duty to his country which had put him in a country to try and preserve a peace that Israel could give a damn about under a UN Mandate that Israel consistently uses to wipe its @ss with except whenever they can use the UN's creation of Israel (which, by the way was never ratified but unilaterally proclaimed) as justification for their existence and right to self-defence; that they could give a damn about any other nation's existence and that their actions too often go far beyond "self-defence" is just part of the hypocracy.

[scandium]

And the verdict is:

Israel's defence forces were yesterday condemned for systematically and deliberately targeting civilians in Lebanon, acts which the respected New York organisation Human Rights Watch described as "serious violations of international law" or war crimes.

The number of Lebanese killed in the 23-day conflict is now close to 900, the vast majority of them civilians, and a quarter of Lebanon's population is in flight. Although the Israeli government claims it is taking all possible measures to minimise civilian harm, Human Rights Watch said their detailed investigations revealed "a systematic failure by the Israeli Defence Forces to distinguish between combatants and civilians". The 50-page report flatly accuses Israeli forces of launching artillery and air attacks "with limited or dubious military gain but excessive civilian cost".

"In dozens of attacks, Israeli forces struck an area with no apparently military target," the report states.

In a particularly damning section it concludes that "in some cases, the timing and intensity of the attack, the absence of a military target, as well as return strikes against rescuers, suggest that Israeli forces deliberately targeted civilians".

Israel's defence is that it targets Hizbollah and that the militia uses civilians as human shields, thereby putting them at risk. The report could find no evidence to back this up. When investigators went to Qana, Srifa and Tyre, where numerous civilians had been killed, they could see "no evidence" of Hizbollah military activity in the area, no spent ammunition, abandoned weapons or military equipment or dead or wounded fighters.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1212770.ece

Naturally the usual Israeli apologists will, without citing a shred of evidence to the contrary, try and poke holes in this... but what use are facts next to Israeli propaganda posters and cartoons anyway? :88)

[Gizzmoe]

139 replies and no move forward, there are basically always the same arguments and counter-arguments. Time to close the thread.