(no subject)

[dreamer_easy]

Targetting terrorists who are shelling innocent people is one thing. Targetting UN schools you know to be packed with civilian families is another. I'm going to fax the Israeli Embassy in Australia with a plea for this to stop. (You may wish to email, fax, or phone Israel's embassy in the UK, the US, Canada, or your own country.)

(Hamas' vicious response deserves nothing but contempt, but they don't have an embassy.)

Comments

A plague on both their houses.

[murasaki-1966.livejournal.com]

This is a good article on perceptions of Israel in the USA, and how that reinforces certain practices (shall we say)

http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2009/01/06/gaza_war/

As far as I'm concerned, Israel can no longer use the Holocaust card any longer. They are doing to others what was done to them.

Hamas, are a pack of thugs with no real desire to form an alternative government for the Palestine people. They just want to destroy Israel.

Re: A plague on both their houses.

[purrdence.livejournal.com]

My sympathy for Israel started to wane when I was watching a doco on telly and found out that pro-Isrel factions used suicide bombers to further the 'give the Jews Isreal' cause before Israel was formed... and then they condemn other groups from using the exact same tactics.

Re: A plague on both their houses.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

I am sympathetic towards, and angry with, both sides in this interminable conflict. But regardless of history or past or present behaviour, nobody gets to blow up children, and I don't care to hear their excuses for doing so.

Re: A plague on both their houses.

[jblum.livejournal.com]

As far as I'm concerned, Israel can no longer use the Holocaust card any longer. They are doing to others what was done to them.

I think the targeting of the school was profoundly wrong, but what you said simply isn't true. There's a criminal act, and then there's genocide. The latter can't be used to excuse the former, but neither does the former equal it.

plagues and nightmares.

[ajponder.livejournal.com]

It's a nightmare borne of political expedience and god rest all the souls caught in the middle of it.

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

You do know that Hamas launched attacks from that school, right? (see: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/01/022488.php) And you also know that many of the things being reported about civilian casualties in Gaza are actually not true also, don't you? (see also: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1053225.html - this one is particularly egregious, as the claim was that Israel had killed these individuals, while Hamas had actually done so in 2005).

Further, see http://www.ynetnews.com/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-3651783,00.html for more on how Hamas is intentionally exacerbating the humanitarian problems in Gaza.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

I'm taking my information from the mainstream media and from the UN, not from the blogosphere, and certainly not from propaganda released by either Hamas or Israel.

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

The UN is hardly an unbiased source in this matter, and much of the mainstream media is highly unreliable. Be forewarned that the information you obtain from those sources is likely to be incomplete or biased.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Who do you consider an unbiased and reliable source? How about humanitarian organisations working on the ground, such as MSF?

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

I consider no sources unbiased. My impression of MSF is that they are relatively nonpartisan, but in this particular conflict many moral compasses have become inverted.

Consider: you were going to fax the Israeli embassy about the Israeli army returning fire toward people attacking them from a school. Would you also feel the same outrage about the Hamas rockets which have intentionally targeted civilians over the past 2 years?

If Hamas laid down their weapons, there would be no conflict. If Israel laid down their weapons, there would be no Israel. Hamas intentionally uses human shields to try to win sympathy for their cause. Contrast that with the Israelis sending text-message warnings to people living in areas which are about to be attacked, and you quickly see that Israel cares more about the lives of Gazan civilians than Hamas does.

(frozen)

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

You know, I think I speak for many people in this world when I say that we are sick to our back teeth with the rationalisations, whining, sloganeering, and general bullshit from both sides of this interminable conflict. Oh, oh, everyone is so unfair to us, when we're really the victims, and they're the ones don't care about human life, blah diddy blah diddy blah. It's the same pathetic excuses that people have been spouting since the dawn of time: blowing up children is wrong, except when our side do it because blather blather blather, and anyway it never happened and they asked for it and we're still better than them because yadda yadda yadda. I've quite had enough of it, thank you - whether from Hamas and their supporters, or Israel and theirs. Especially since you can switch the names on the statements and they sound pretty much the fucking same.

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

One more link: the head of that UN school was one of the main Hamas rocket masters: http://www.reuters.com/article/middleeastCrisis/idUSL05686115

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

That article dates from May last year. It's about a different individual and a different school.