Israel minister threatens to annex West Bank land

[Farnsworth,Luther P.]

Originally Posted by 86Dude

Uh, because dislocating people for profit is immoral.

Yes, the Arab League's invasion and ethnic cleansing was certainly immoral. Welcome back to the moral side of the issue.

[Farnsworth,Luther P.]

Then again, Sarah Palin is an complete ignoramus. Coincidence?

And yet her IQ and knowledge far surpasses your own. How embarrassing for you that must be, if you had any sense of how ludicrous you are, which you obviously don't, and that's why even Ospama entirely ignores the faux 'Peace Left'; he only needed your votes, not your imbecilic input on any issue.

[Cyclone Ranger]

Originally Posted by Guido

but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.

Nor has he ever seen such in Israel, because he's never provided even the slightest evidence Israel ever did any such thing - unsurprisingly, given his rabid and blatant anti-Israel prejudice (and pro-Palestinian bias):

First, the sheer malice of this comment speaks for itself; if the Israelis, with the most powerful army in the Middle East enticed “children like mice into a trap and murdered them for sport,” why was only one person killed on June 17 - as tragic as that was - when Hedges wrote his “diary” entry on the events in question?

Moreover, Hedges’ account is at odds with those in other media, including his home publication, the New York Times. Reporting the events of June 17, Times correspondent Douglas Frantz wrote: “The Israeli military said soldiers had been under attack with stones and bottles” when they opened fire on “a crowd trying to tear down surrounding Jewish settlements in Gush Katif.”

Other news agencies reported that the Palestinians began throwing stones at soldiers in an Israeli settlement near Khan Younis after an attempted suicide bombing near Dahaniya in Gaza the same day. Margot Dudkevitch of the Jerusalem Post reported:

Near the entrance to Dahaniya, soldiers became suspicious of a man driving a donkey cart. As he approached the soldiers, the man jumped from the cart and detonated explosives hidden in it...IDF sappers detonated the remaining bombs that failed to explode, among them four gas canisters and two mines.

Soldiers on duty, already on edge, were aware that innocent looking Palestinians had tried to blow up other Israeli soldiers elsewhere in the Gaza Strip the same day. But Hedges did not even bother to report in his “diary” of events the attempted suicide bombing aimed at killing Israelis.

Similarly, an armed Palestinian gang shot and killed a 12 year old Palestinian on June 16 in the town of Rafah in the Gaza Strip. Hedges, who was in Gaza at the time, makes no mention of this either. On June 18 it was reported in The Jerusalem Post:

Yesterday, Palestinians, who had blamed Israel for the death of another 12 year-old boy near Rafah on Saturday, admitted that the boy had been killed by an armed opposition faction operating in Rafah. According to reports, a dispute broke out between Palestinian security officials and an armed gang that shot at soldiers near Rafah Yam. The Palestinian security officials demanded that the armed gang leave, and as they drove off gang members began shooting at random, mortally wounding Suliman Massari, 12, who was in a car, and wounding several other passengers.

http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_co...32&x_article=4

[Cyclone Ranger]

Originally Posted by grimrebuke

Can you give me one reason why Arabs should not be allowed to resettle in Tel Aviv, or Jerusalem? It is the same question.

Because they don't have the right to an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza AND a voting majority in Israel (not to mention an overwhelming majority in Jordan as well).

If the Palestinians have the right to an Arab nationalist state, the Jews have a right to a Jewish national state without bogus 'resettlement' claims undermining their status.

[Ponce]

The Zionist will continued to expand for as long as there is a place to expad to..... and after they finish with Earth they will start with outer spance........I can only hope that the Martians are smarter than we were.

[Cyclone Ranger]

Thanks for the moron's point of view.

[Guido]

Nor has he ever seen such in Israel, because he's never provided even the slightest evidence Israel ever did any such thing

1. Hedges was there and you weren't; therefore you have no basis whatsoever for saying the he didn't see what he said he saw.

2. Hedges' "evidence" is his eye-witness testimony; because Hedges is generally known as an honest journalist with a high degree of integrity (no one -- other than you and you don't count -- has ever accused him of falsification, making things up, etc.), the burden is on you to provide some evidence that he fabricated the story.

3. We have extensive proof that Israel, during its last Gaza massacre committed numerous war crimes, including crimes of gratuitous cruelty, such as shooting woman and children who were waving white flags, driving people to take refuge in buildings, and then bombing the buildings, and so on -- all of which is meticulously documented in the Goldstone Report and the HRW report, for instance:

In one case documented in the report, on January 7 in eastern Jabalya, two women and three children from the family of Khalid ‘Abd Rabbo were standing in front of their home after an Israeli soldier ordered them outside - at least three of them holding pieces of white cloth - when a soldier near a tank opened fire, killing two girls, ages 2 and 7, and wounding the third girl and their grandmother.

"We spent seven to nine minutes waving the flags, and our faces were looking at them [the soldiers]," said the grandmother, who was shot twice. "And suddenly they opened fire and the girls fell to the ground."

Accounts from witnesses, tank tracks, an ammunition box and bullet casings found at the scene, and an examination of the grandmother's wounds by forensic experts indicate that the Israeli soldier fired upon identifiable and unarmed women and children.

In five of the seven incidents detailed in the report, Israeli soldiers shot at civilians who were walking down the street with white flags, trying to leave the areas of fighting.

On January 13 in the village of Khuza'a, an Israeli soldier shot and killed Rawiya al-Najjar, 47, and wounded her relative, Jasmin al-Najjar, 23. The women were walking in a small group on a straight road during daylight, with Rawiya al-Najjar holding a white flag, following Israeli military orders to leave their neighborhood after it had come under Israeli control. Soldiers had occupied a house 230 meters down the street, but apparently fired no warning shots to deter the group as it approached.

http://www.hrw.org/node/85113

Do you find it hard to believe that soldiers who murder women and children who are waving white flags might take some pleasure in this kind of activity, as reported by Chris Hedges?

[GanjaFreebird]

1. Hedges was there and you weren't; therefore you have no basis whatsoever for saying the he didn't see what he said he saw.

I was there too, for 8 years, and CR is 100% correct!!

2. Hedges' "evidence" is his eye-witness testimony; because Hedges is generally known as an honest journalist with a high degree of integrity (no one -- other than you and you don't count -- has ever accused him of falsification, making things up, etc.), the burden is on you to provide some evidence that he fabricated the story.

"fabrication" or not, he's clearly biased and not objective when it comes to both sides.

We have extensive proof that Israel, during its last Gaza massacre committed numerous war crimes, including crimes of gratuitous cruelty, such as shooting woman and children who were waving white flags, driving people to take refuge in buildings, and then bombing the buildings, and so on -- all of which is meticulously documented in the Goldstone Report and the HRW report, for instance:

Guido, you were the one to say VERY LOUD that the murder of women and children during war time is irrelevant and that the Palestinians should not be critisized for murdering Israeli women and children. Why are you critisizing the Israelis for that, then?

[Cyclone Ranger]

Originally Posted by Guido

. Hedges was there and you weren't; therefore you have no basis whatsoever for saying the he didn't see what he said he saw.

As noted by CAMERA, others in the area didn't see what he saw. He's biased and can't substantiate his claims.

Hedges is generally known as an honest journalist with a high degree of integrity

Evidence?

(no one -- other than you and you don't count -- has ever accused him of falsification, making things up, etc.), the burden is on you to provide some evidence that he fabricated the story.

Many people have accused him of fabrications; and the CAMERA article provides plenty of evidence his story is bogus.

3. We have extensive proof that Israel, during its last Gaza massacre committed numerous war crimes

No, you have extensive CLAIMS and little, if any, proof.

In one case documented in the report, on January 7 in eastern Jabalya, two women and three children from the family of Khalid ‘Abd Rabbo were standing in front of their home after an Israeli soldier ordered them outside - at least three of them holding pieces of white cloth - when a soldier near a tank opened fire, killing two girls, ages 2 and 7, and wounding the third girl and their grandmother.

That has already been debunked:

http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_co...x_article=1728

Khaled is not a credible witness; and his various accounts have been highly inconsistent.

[Guido]

Originally Posted by GanjaFreebird

I was there too, for 8 years, and CR is 100% correct!!



"fabrication" or not, he's clearly biased and not objective when it comes to both sides.



Guido, you were the one to say VERY LOUD that the murder of women and children during war time is irrelevant and that the Palestinians should not be critisized for murdering Israeli women and children. Why are you critisizing the Israelis for that, then?

1. No, you weren't at Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip on June 16, 2001, and you weren't present at the scene witnessed and described by Chris Hedges. Therefore, you have as little basis as Cowpunk to doubt Hedges' account, which is to say, no basis whatsoever.

2. What exactly is "biased" and "not objective" about this description?

"I sit in the shade of a palm-roofed hut on the edge of the dunes, momentarily defeated by the heat, the grit, the jostling crowds, the stench of the open sewers and rotting garbage. A friend of Azmi's brings me, on a tray, a cold glass of tart, red carcade juice.

Barefoot boys, clutching kites made out of scraps of paper and ragged soccer balls, squat a few feet away under scrub trees. Men in flowing white or gray galabias—homespun robes—smoke cigarettes in the shade of slim eaves. Two emaciated donkeys, their ribs protruding, are tethered to wooden carts with rubber wheels.

It is still. The camp waits, as if holding its breath. And then, out of the dry furnace air, a disembodied voice crackles over a loudspeaker.

"Come on, dogs," the voice booms in Arabic. "Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!"

I stand up. I walk outside the hut. The invective continues to spew: "Son of a bitch!" "Son of a whore!" "Your mother's cunt!"

The boys dart in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separates the camp from the Jewish settlement. They lob rocks toward two armored jeeps parked on top of the dune and mounted with loudspeakers. Three ambulances line the road below the dunes in anticipation of what is to come.

A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scatter, running clumsily across the heavy sand. They descend out of sight behind a sandbank in front of me. There are no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shoot with silencers. The bullets from the M-16 rifles tumble end over end through the children's slight bodies. Later, in the hospital, I will see the destruction: the stomachs ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs and torsos.

Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom were under the age of eighteen. One was twelve. This afternoon they kill an eleven-year-old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more, three of whom are under eighteen. Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered—death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo—but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport."

By "biased" and "not objective" do you mean to say that Hedges description is not an accurate description of what he actually saw? In what way is it not accurate?

3. I never said or implied that the murder of civilians in war is "irrelevant". It's extremely relevant to anyone to whom moral principle is important.

I DID say that the Americans and Israelis have no principled basis on which to condemn the deliberate slaughter of non-combatants by others, e.g., arabs. This is demonstrated unequivocally by the frequency with which our own governments do exactly that, and for the very worst of reasons, such as fun or convenience.

[Cyclone Ranger]

I'm not Cowpunk.

[GanjaFreebird]

1. No, you weren't at Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip on June 16, 2001, and you weren't present at the scene witnessed and described by Chris Hedges. Therefore, you have as little basis as Cowpunk to doubt Hedges' account, which is to say, no basis whatsoever.

But I was present during Palestinian terrorist attacks, therefore, I undertand from a first-hand expeirience why it is important for Israel to defend itself by whatever means necessary.

2. What exactly is "biased" and "not objective" about this description?

Did he also describe the Israeli victims of terrorism?

3. I never said or implied that the murder of civilians in war is "irrelevant". It's extremely relevant to anyone to whom moral principle is important.

I DID say that the Americans and Israelis have no principled basis on which to condemn the deliberate slaughter of non-combatants by others, e.g., arabs. This is demonstrated unequivocally by the frequency with which our own governments do exactly that, and for the very worst of reasons, such as fun or convenience.

Again, so is it ok for Palestinian terrorists to kill Israeli women and children, or not? And if it is, then, why shouldn't Israel be able to do vice versa?

[Farnsworth,Luther P.]

1. No, you weren't at Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip on June 16, 2001, and you weren't present at the scene witnessed and described by Chris Hedges. Therefore, you have as little basis as Cowpunk to doubt Hedges' account, which is to say, no basis whatsoever.

Where were you, guido? Are you a witness and can corroborate Hedges fable? Were you over there building a shrine to Saint Pancake?