“All you need is love” / “there is nothing to fear but fear itself”

If I were you I would start doing a little research before posting misdirected libel online. While Israel might not be the white knight it wants to be seen as, blaming one side never covers the whole picture. Hamas is NOT a unifying force as it sits it is committed to the eradication of the Nation of Israel and the Jewish religion. As far as peace this is their charter’s view of peace, “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with.”

They even hate the Rotary Club I mean come on….

Only fifteen people died from Hassam rockets in eight years! More UN relief worker than that were killed by Israel in their last Gaza invasion.

Whatever the discussion, the rules of engagement must be applied eqully to all sides. Israel does not do this. They just (Feb 15) expanded a settlement in the West Bank. Did Hamas or Fatah physically occupy Israeli land in response? No. What would have been Israel’s response if Hamas or Fatah had done to them what they did? A massive deadly attack. The Bible says do unto others as you would have done unto yourselves. Israel does not do this at all.

The situation is tragic. Hamas is honest but fanatically unrealistic and its support of the rocket attacks is hugely counterproductive. Fatah is corrupt and inconsistent. Israel is self deceiving, rule bending and mean.

Israel, if you want peace, look honestly into your actions. Would respond differently than the Palestinian if some country, say Jordan, claimed Israeli land and began constructing settlement “peacefully”? And if ,when they were attacked by you, they claimed you were attacking civilian settlements, would you see their logic and let them continue building? That sort of compliance toward occupation and land seizureis what you expect of the Palestinians.

Hamas, if you want success, bend a little. Face reality. You are too scary and that draws violence and irrationlity from within and without.

Fatah, if you want success, clean up your operations. Work to provide a transparent and efficient government that can represent your people. Hamas takes your support because they are more honest, not because their ideas are more popular.

Point #1: “murderous shock and awe”. On this point, you’re right – Israel did that. But all Hamas had to do was reinstate the ceasefire. I would expect Palestinians to be more concerned for the welfare of their people than Israel, their avowed enemy. But Hamas chose – as it consistently does – to assert its military attempt to eradicate Israel rather than protect its own people. Wouldn’t you do that for your family and neighbors? NOT fight? It didn’t have to recognize Israel, pay obeisance, or even look bad to their own people – just stop firing rockets into Israel.
Instead, Abu Obeida of Hamas told Al-Jazeera, “Our capacity to launch rockets hasn’t been diminished, and we will launch more rockets with God’s help.” (Note the invocation of God, by the way. Not “peace with God’s help.”) Tehran University will celebrate the end of the Gaza war in a feast that will be attended by Iranian President Ahmadinejad. University students will hold a special celebration at Tehran University on Tuesday to “commemorate the Palestinian resistance and to discuss the consequences of the bitter Zionist defeat.” President Ahmadinejad on Monday described the Israeli decision to pull its troops out of Gaza as a “victory” for the Palestinian resistance.
By the way, Reuters reports that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak told a summit of Arab leaders in Kuwait on Monday that Hamas invited Israel’s offensive against Gaza by not extending their cease-fire when it expired last month.
Also, you dismiss Israel’s motives (“Israel trotted out only an infinitesimally more credible excuse”). What’s your basis for that charge other than your own prejudice?

Point #2: “Rockets exist but they’re little more than slingshots…” That’s patently untrue. Those rockets have destroyed houses, schools and playgrounds – as well as killed people. But you minimize the violence done to the Israelis because your fundamental argument is that they are colonizers. At least be candid enough to admit that those “slingshots” are lethal and that Israelis in some towns have had to sleep in bomb shelters for eight years and their children have to have bomb shelters in their schools. Sirens go off three and four times a day. Don’t suggest that that is not serious aggression on Hamas’ part.

#3. “Palestinians who’ve never been accorded the democratic space within which to gain redress of their eminently just grievances.”
Oh those poor democratic Palestinians – all they want is life and liberty. Right. Of course, that has to include the right to cut off the hands of 8 year old thieves and to stone to death girls for the crime of being raped.
You ignore – either deliberately or out of ignorance – the reality that Hamas is a religious, not nationalistic, organization. They are committed to the implementation of fundamentalist Islam over all of the land, not just Gaza and the West Bank, and together with other fundamentalist groups, around the world. Let’s not forget that yesterday Hamas militiamen rounded up hundreds of Fatah members in Gaza and a Fatah official in Ramallah said at least 100 of his men had been killed or wounded as a result of the massive Hamas crackdown. Some had been brutally tortured. The official said that at least three of the detainees had their eyes put out by their interrogators.
Hama speaks in the language of democracy but means to use it as a vehicle for implementing sharia, Forget one-man-one-vote. Maronites, Copts, Eastern Orthodox and missionizing Christians have been victims of Islamic prejudice for centuries. This prejudice is manifest in most Islamic countries, where religious inequality requires that non-Moslems must wear distinctive clothing, may not look a Moslem in the eye, may not defend themselves in court against a Moslem and must pay a tax. In the case of proselytizing, non-Moslems can be sentenced to death, as has happened repeatedly.

Point #4. “unlawfully occupied or embargoed … for sixty years of relentless oppression” This is of course your real issue: not the settlements but Israel proper: 60 years of “repressive” action by Israel. The Palestinians could have a two-state solution if they would only take it. But they are determined to win a one-state solution bought at the price of a second Holocaust. This is the reality that Israel’s critics willfully refuse to acknowledge. You ignore the fact that there were five wars against Israel by its Arab neighbors – wars pledged to drive Israelis “into the sea”. Were Hamas to have the power to be the dominant force, Israel would not be confined to Gaza, it would be totally and mercilessly destroyed, and that would be done in the name of God, no less. We can go back and forth debating whether Israel’s actions are ‘disproportionate’ or even inherently inept but let’s be clear that if the situation were reversed, Hamas has absolutely no intention of compromise.Now, THAT’s genocide. But nary a mention by you.

Well, how about if the hundreds and thousands of Indians had been slaughtered YESTERDAY? What if “between their women and children” was the ONLY place these Indians had from which to launch a resistance? And finally, what if these Indian rockets were being launched, not into large cities, but rather into rural areas interspersed with small towns, where the damage and casualties are minimal? THIS is the case with Hamas in Gaza, NOT what “enlightened” describes.

Hamas rockets killed 4 Israelis (one a soldier) with its rockets in all of 2008 before the Gaza invasion. During the invasion Hamas killed 13 more Israelis, while Israel killed over 1300 innocent Palestinian men, women and children. The Hamas rockets are a symbolic and political act, demanding freedom from brutal oppression. Israel’s invasion of Gaza was a viscous slaughter.

Not at single Arab country gives a penny to allow “palestinians” improve their life. All the relief help is to organize rallies and build more rockets and bombs. If suicide bombing is such an acceptable way of life there, perhaps they could all blow themselves up, go to heaven, and leave Israel alone. Israel is the most productive country in the world; for its size, it has contributed more to advances in living in medicine, technology and arts than all the billions of Arabs that have collectively ever lived on earth.
Their goal is peace, the Arabs goal is destruction of Israel…pure and simple.

As of January, 4th 2009 the number of Israeli’s killed by Hamas rocket attacks as of 2001 = 28 (http://mwcnews.net/content/view/27683&Itemid=1)

Number of Palestinians killed in ten days of the Israeli military attack on Gaza = 531
(http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/01/2009157474464964.html)
entitled and

More eye opening stats:
(http://www.btselem.org/English/Statistics/Casualties.asp)
(http://www.ifamericansknew.org/stats/deaths.html#source)

Not to gloss over the deaths of non-combatants, neither Palestinian or Israeli, but the disparity in the death toll between Palestinians and Israeli’s definitely impedes upon any notion of a reasonable defense of human life. But then again at the heart of nationalism or patriotism is a chauvinism that denies the validity of a universal humanity in favor of the rights of the citizen. Liberalism liberated itself from the rule of theocracy in Europe only to enshrine of a sovereign nation-state and the idea of the rights of the citizen as new superstition that glosses over the reality that the earth is the natural habitat of man and that humans, regardless of where they hail from, share a common origin and common biological needs.

I have not kept up with the Israeli casualties but the first day I know 3 of their soldiers were killed by their own tanks and fortunately for them, only a small number of Israeli soldiers have been killed. But when you talk about the casualties among the Palestinian, the numbers are in the hundreds and a great many of them are women and children. How can the United States support such an action? Why are we not insisting that the Israelis withdraw, that the Red Cross or the Crescent Cross be admitted and that aid be offered to those poor suffering people. How can we support Israelis when we know that what they are doing is morally wrong. We stood by them when they invaded Lebanon because one of thier soldiers was captured. It would be laughable if it were not so tragic.

We continue to support any action Israel makes because so many of our politicians are dependent on Jewish backers to contribute to their campaigns. The networks are run by Jewish businessmen. Until recently, most of Wall Street was runs by Jewish people. They are a very talented, gifted group of people. But they have way too much power in our newspaper and television industry. The news is slated and anyone who says anything negative is automatically anti-semetic. We have to separate our guilt about the HOlocaust from this current situation. Is the killing of Arab women and children ok because they are being killed by jewish soldiers. I listen to the BBC because they do not seem to be afraid to call a spade a spade, where the American press gives the Jewish casualites as much weight as the Palestinian ones, even though the percentage is about 50 to one. This holocaust must stop. We know Bush won’t doanything, but OBama should condemn Israel’s action and call for a truce. Enough already!!

I don’t like Israel occupying Palestine either, but you can’t say just because they’re only little flying explosives that it should be brushed off as just desserts. People are voted out of office for issues like bad public transport and not keeping the local sports franchise from moving on = do you think an average American would hesitate to vote out a guy who’s not doing something about the rockets landing on the baseball diamond on a Saturday morning during little league?

Everyday folks aren’t big on looking in the mirror and taking responsibility for the country’s direction, regardless of how much you wish they were. They’re jealously protecting their kids and their walls.

You shall not kill… oops
You shall not steal (kidnap according to Talmudic interpretations), even foreign peoples… oops
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour… “Hamas attacked us” yikes
You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbour.. including their land… shucks.

Four of the ten commandments broken repeatedly by Israel since it came into existence. Says a lot about the moral and spiritual condition of Israel and its leaders.

Personally, I think Hamas shouldn’t be firing rockets into Palestine, even if the part they’re firing into has been in the possession of the Zionist Occupation Regime (ZOR) since 1948, rather than since 1967. Doing so, unless they’re targeting a specific base or facility of the ZOR, seems to be an implicit recognition that the areas that they’re targeting, which are inhabited by both Palestinians and settlers, are actually part of something called “Israel”, rather than occupied Palestine. I certainly hope that Hamas doesn’t recognize any “right to exist” of this so-called “Israel”.

But Hamas and all anti-imperialists have a right and, perhaps, a responsibility to retaliate against legitimate military targets. Even if one is much more cautious than the Zionists are in defining “legitimate military targets”, clearly any person or entity anywhere in the world that actually arms and/or finances the ZOR is such a legitimate target.

I don’t give a damn who or where my ancestors were a few thousand years ago. I don’t even know a hell of a lot about my grandparents, who spoke mostly Yiddish and came to New York from Eastern Europe early in the last century. I do know that I grew up, as did my parents, as part of the Jewish community of New York City, and that my parents spoke Yiddish as well as English. Also, my grandparents and, to a lesser extent, my parents practiced Jewish religious rituals, like eating kosher food.

I don’t think that being “Jewish”, whether by an ethno-cultural definition or a racist, genetic one, gives anyone any special rights to land that other people called “Jews” occupied in the distant past. I’m an egalitarian, believing that the earth, to the extent it “belongs” to people at all, belongs to everybody, but that people who have established lives somewhere shouldn’t be displaced by newcomers. (But not being displaced is not the same as keeping an excess of land or resources as your “property” or “your country”, as, e.g., capitalists and AmeriKKKan nationalists want to do.)