Arkansas Blog

Maybe I'm just overly skeptical, but I find it very suspicious that Israel decides to take this action only a couple of weeks before DUHbyuh leaves office. Somehow, I don't think it's a coinkydink.

Israel had no choice but to enter Gaza. They can't just sit there and allow Hamas to randomly fire seventy-missiles-per-day into Israel. This is a legitimate exercise of self-defense.

You find it suspicious about the timing? This has been going on for EIGHT years and they are just now taking steps to end it. Incredible. What do you think that the 'messiah' will do when he gets in office. I bet he talks Hamas to death.

---Hamas leaders responded by calling for a "Day of Wrath" to avenge the deaths as the party warned that it may resume suicide attacks against Israel for the first time since January 2005. ---

So, more war in the Middle East. 3,000 years of conflict with 2,901 more years of killing to go. And as always with modern war, civilians are the targets, contrary to pious statements from the perpetrators on either side. Often times the killing spills out of the Middle East (terrorism) but the core root of it all is so entrenched in that geographical region so there is no solution. Too bad the US always sees fit to get involved in such even those basic wisdom compels the opposite.

This would be an extremely easy thing to stop. All Hamas has to do is to stop lobbing explosives into Israeli living space. The Jews and Muslims should just show a little Christian forebearance, verdad?

Hopefully, the IDF will be successful at stopping the rocket attacks that are killing civilians. Hamas, as expected, will hide behind civilians in order to force the IDF to inflict civilian casualties. Nothing new here. The US needs to provide military hardware and supplies and provide political support. The Europeans will do their usual bit. They will wring their hands and act like the last eight years of rocket attacks had never happened. They only notice civilian casualties when they are Arabs and not Jews.

Hamas has one consistent and obvious objective----the destruction of Israel. They will manuver to appear to being reasonable but what is reasonable about eight years of agression and one broken ceasefire?

Who forced the elections that let Hamas take power?

Who unilaterally withdrew from Gaza? Who made promises of peace when they did withdraw?

I do not challenge Hamas' popularity among the residents of Gaza and the West Bank. They could probably win an election in the West Bank. That is my very point. The Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank do not want peace. They want the destruction of Israel---hence their embrace of Hamas.

Hamas run extensive social programs and has gained popularity in Palestinian society by establishing hospitals, education systems, libraries and other services throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Hamas' charter calls for the destruction of the State of Israel and its replacement with a Palestinian Islamic state in the area that is now Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Hamas describes its conflict with Israel as political and not religious or antisemitic. However, its founding charter, writings, and many of its public statements reflect the influence of antisemitic conspiracy theories

-borrowed

Collective punishment is a war crime.

This isn't punishment. It is an intervention to stop Hamas from firing rockets into Israel. When Hamas stops firing rockets, Israel can move back.

I wonder if we're wasting our time/resources trying to broker peace between entities that have been feuding for thousands of years...like in Iraq. Guess not...gotta have hope.

----borrowed---

The United States of Israel

by Leon Fisher, Unknown News

When was the last time you read or heard anything in the mainstream media or from the Washington politicians that seemed unfavorable to Israel? You have not, and you will not! When referring to Israel, the press and politicians use words and phrases such as:

The only democracy in the Middle East!
The Israeli Defense Forces!
Israel's right to defend itself!

In contrast, when speaking of Israel's Islamic neighbors, the press and the politicians constantly use the words:

Terrorist states!
Harboring terrorist organizations!
They want to destroy Israel!

Adding to this anti-Islamic climate are the right-wing radio talk show hosts,
many of whom have gone to Israel as guests of the Israeli government, refer to
Muslims as "Islamofascists", homicide bombers, and define Islam as the religion
of hate. All positive support for Israel, and not a shred of support for Israel's victims. When these shills for Israel are confronted with the facts, for which they have no reply, the conversation inevitably ends with the accusation of anti-Semitism.

This narrow one-sided view is proof of Israel's infiltration into American politics and the mass media. Watching over what is said and done in Washington and the mass media is AIPAC, American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, a powerful front organization directly linked to Israel whose activities are that of influencing the political leadership of the United States, and that of public opinion through the use of bribery, blackmail, espionage, and intimidation.

Persons and organizations sympathetic to Israel have infiltrated into the core of every major political and newsgathering process in America. This constitutes nothing less than a takeover, a coup by a foreign entity upon the US government and press, made all the more easier by the corrupt nature of US politics.

The result of this disproportionate Israeli influence has created a political, military, and financial quagmire for America with no end in sight. Even freedom of speech, protected by the Constitution of the United States, is now under assault by the powerful Israeli lobby, making it a hate crime to disagree or criticize Israel. This so called hate crime legislation has already been made into law in Canada, and is being debated in Congress here in America. Should this pass into law, freedom of speech, such as you are reading now, will be no more.

Israel is only one of the many lobbies and special interests which have access to our legislators in Washington, all of whom are steadily undermining the security and welfare of the American people. If our Republic is to survive, these money changers must be driven out of the temple of our government.

>>Persons and organizations sympathetic to Israel have infiltrated into the core of every major political and newsgathering process in America.<<

In 2007 two retired proffs from UA, one English, one journalism, were treated to seminars held in Israel. Both were aware of what was going on. Both proffs write for professional journals.

Both learned that they were not allowed to venture into Gaza to get another point of view.

.

When was the last time you heard of a journalist getting murdered or his head whacked off for criticizing Israel or Judism?

Letting your citizens being bombarded and killed for eight years will get you kicked out of office. Hopefully, these clowns that now run Israel will be booted out in February.

---borrowed---

"We must expel Arabs and take their places."
-- David Ben Gurion, 1937, Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs, Oxford University Press, 1985.

They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?"
-- Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp. 121-122.

"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."

-- David Ben Gurion, quoted in The Jewish Paradox, by Nahum Goldmann, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978, p. 99.

"Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country."
-- David Ben Gurion, quoted on pp 91-2 of Chomsky's Fateful Triangle, which appears in Simha Flapan's "Zionism and the Palestinians pp 141-2 citing a 1938 speech.

"There is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist."
-- Golda Meir, statement to The Sunday Times, 15 June, 1969.

"How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to."
-- Golda Meir, March 8, 1969.

"We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!"
-- Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.
"[The Palestinians] are beasts walking on two legs."

-- Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the 'Beasts,"' New Statesman, June 25, 1982.

"The settlement of the Land of Israel is the essence of Zionism. Without settlement, we will not fulfill Zionism. It's that simple."
-- Yitzhak Shamir, Maariv, 02/21/1997.

"(The Palestinians) would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls."
-- Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) Yitzhak Shamir in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988

"Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories."
-- Benyamin Netanyahu, then Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, former Prime Minister of Israel, speaking to students at Bar Ilan University, from the Israeli journal Hotam, November 24, 1989.

"The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more"....
-- Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time - August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000

"If we thought that instead of 200 Palestinian fatalities, 2,000 dead would put an end to the fighting at a stroke, we would use much more force...."
-- Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, quoted in Associated Press, November 16, 2000.

"It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization, or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands."

-- Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.

"Israel may have the right to put others on trial, but certainly no one has the right to put the Jewish people and the State of Israel on trial."

-- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, 25 March, 2001 quoted in BBC News Online

Kill them! Kill them all and lets be done with it! But after all the Palestinians are slaughtered it will just be someone else Israel will have to bomb with US made weapons. But for Allah's sake, kill all the Palestinians so we can finally have some peace and the endless daily killing will stop for a while.

Here is what Bertrand Russell had to say just days before he died at age 98:

The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was "given" by a foreign power to another people for the creation of a new state. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their numbers increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East. We are frequently told that we must sympathise with Israel because of the suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. [...] What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy.
-Bertrand Russell, 31 January 1970

But alas, if it weren't for the fact that the US is a Christian Country, and of course Israel being Jewish (aka pre-Christ - Christian), we must stick up for the little brothers...no?

Religion makes for some strange bedfellows, no?

Oh, wait - did I just say 'strange'?

If there was ever a situation that demonstrated the truth that two wrongs don't make a right, it is the Israeli/Palestinian issue. In fact, they prove that thousands of wrongs won't make something right. Trying to assess blame without going back to 1948 is futile and even trying to understand without going back to the 1930's.

Anyone who gets the idea anytime in the future of taking occupied lands and 'creating' a state and homeland for another group of people need only look to this situation to know it cannot ever, EVER, work.

I have Jewish friends and I am aware of their feelings, but I also remember the tragic story of the elderly father living in the West Bank who still had the keys to his home in what is now Israel on his keyring. This was a home his father had crafted with his own hands on land they had worked for and loved.

This is just as much a no win situation as trying to give back El Paso or lower California to Mexico and expecting those who've lived in homes there for many years to willingly participate.

Thanks to all for some excellent posts. The historical perspectives have been enlightening, giving me pause to rethink long-held opinions on this subject.