Comrade Tortoise wrote:Havoc, have you considered the idea that perhaps both sides are guilty as sin, and that they BOTH willingly participate in a never-ending cycle of violence? Now, I dont think the average Palistinian or Israeli is a monster. But the governments that make policy certainly are. Hamas is a monstrous organization guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. But so is the state of Israel.
Surely you are not actually trying to equate an organization such as Hamas with a democratic government elected by its own people that is under rocket attack and facing ever-louder public outcry
demanding that action be taken to stop it. Surely you are not actually simplistically claiming "a pox on both their houses" in a case such as this. That is like claiming that because US troops did commit crimes against Japanese soldiers during the Pacific Theatre of World War II, that Japan and the United States had equal moral culpability for the horrors of that war. That statement is absurd on its face.
I will accept that the Israelis, especially certain factions of the Israeli populace, are culpable for what has happened here. What I will not accept is that Israel is a monstrous organization on the same level as Hamas. Israel has not dedicated itself to the extinction of the Arab peoples. Israel does not randomly lob rockets into civilian areas for the purpose of causing a maximum number of civilian casualties. Israel has not attempted to send car bombs and suicide bombers into Palestine for the purpose of murdering as many people as they could. Israel did not attempt to militarily conquer Jordan or Syria or Egypt for the stated purpose of killing every living thing residing there, as every one of those countries has at one time done, and as Hamas continues to claim they want to do. When Israel has invaded those countries (and they have, each of them, at times), it has been in response to attacks or provocations, and whether or not those attacks have been legitimate (some were and some were not), they were not stated attempts at Genocide, and generally were concluded within a matter of days, once the threat had been resolved (the Lebanon thing in the 80s is the one major exception). That is
not the same thing as declaring total war against a nation into perpetuity and attempting to kill everything in it.
You can of course argue that Israel is not in a position where it NEEDS to do these things, that they have a strategic position that does not render it necessary, and that that is the reason they do what they do, but let us not forget that it is Hamas, not Israel that
exists for the purpose of committing murder. There have been war crimes committed by Israel. I know of several. There have been enough accusations of massacre by Israeli troops that I believe that some of them must be true. There are elements within Israel which are fanatical and bloodthirsty and who wish to conquer the West Bank and rule "Greater Israel".
But Hamas is comprised OF those elements.
A few months ago, in Haifa (I think), there were riots by Jewish Israelis in which terrible crimes were committed against Arabs who lived in the city. I don't
think those crimes extended to murder, but they may have. The perpetrators of those crimes were (in most cases) arrested and charged with the crimes they had committed. Let us compare that to Hamas, whose entire organization is dedicated to the commission of as many of those sorts of acts as they can humanly accomplish. There are a million (roughly) Arabs living in Israel as Israeli citizens, though I have no doubt they are suffering illegal discrimination that would make any American riot. Yet they do live there. They have representatives in the Knesset. They are neither murdered wholesale nor driven out at bayonet-point. Do you actually think that the same would be true of a Jew living in the Gaza Strip?
I'll give you another example, and forgive me if I'm sparing on the details, as I don't have them on-hand. I can do the research if you wish further details.. A group of Israeli fanatics, I think from the settler's lobby, but I'm not sure, decided to commit a terrible atrocity. They loaded a van full of explosives and planned to detonate it in front of an Arab girls' school, I believe within Israel itself (again, not totally sure). Fortunately they were caught, en-route to the school itself, by Israeli police. They were tried, convicted, and sentenced to 30 years in jail, each. That is how Israel deals with such acts, indeed that is also how all civilized nations deal with such acts, including Arab and Muslim ones. Hamas, on the other hand,
instigates them, wherever and whenever possible.
Do not give me this nonsense about how Israel and Hamas are equally evil. That statement is absurd on its head.
They are in desperate poverty under the grip of a foreign occupier that views them as intrinsically inferior.
Israel occupies neither the West Bank, nor Gaza, a fact which should be obvious from the fact that this entire fight began due to dozens of rockets being flung at Israel from Gaza. At the end of this fight, I do not know what will be occupied by who, but
at present, the Palestinians are not being occupied by Israel. They are being occupied by a fanatical terrorist organization that sees their poverty as a convenient means to draw more fighters for a neverending Jihad against the hated Jews.
There is perhaps no more oppressed people in the world than the Palestinians, and the terrible poverty, hopelessness, and grinding bloodshed they suffer draws the pity of the world, as it should. And some of the blame for that is rightly Israel's. But
far more of it belongs to Hamas, to the PLO, to Fatah, and to the other Arab nations who have all thrown their hands up and declared the Palestinians to be an "Israeli problem". To compare Israel to Hamas and claim they are both equally morally bankrupt is just disgusting.
Gaze upon my works, ye mighty, and despair...
Havoc: "So basically if you side against him, he summons Cthulu."
Hotfoot: "Yes, which is reasonable."
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