Palestine 1,140 : Israel 56

This will help you understand why there are so many civilian deaths on the palestinian side:

http://www.idfblog.com/blog/2014/08/04/captured-hamas-combat-manual-explains-benefits-human-shields/

TL;DR: It is part of a Hamas strategy, as found in this “Urban Warfare” manual distributed to Hamas militants.
It is truly unfortunate, and Hamas is committing a pre-meditated war crime. However most of you will still sympathize with them, because “photos of dead children” (and who cares about the facts).

Actually, Israeli children are indoctrinated for peace, not war.

I grew up in Israel and the messages to children are clear:

  • Peace is the only sustainable solution, War should be avoided at all cost
  • Human life is precious, no matter who you are and where you come from

I would also like to mention here that, growing up in Israel, we were exposed to the holocaust. We are shown photos, and we learn about the events as they unfolded. We learn that in the end, we were alone as we were being massacred. We learn how the United Kingdom diverted ships, sank ships, people died, it’s all really awful. To this day I have a hard time seeing very skinny women because of holocaust photos I saw as a child.

Israelis / Jews all grow up with this information taught in schools, and we are all very determined not to allow history to repeat itself. It is a war for survival, against a very determined enemy who has Israel’s destruction as their official goal in their terrorist organization’s chapter.

There is this misconception that Palestinians are few and weak, and that Israel is strong and powerful. This is ridiculous. Israel is surrounded by hundreds of millions of Arabs, and Hamas is getting funding, training and weaponry from neighboring countries. Compare the number of Jews in the world to the number of Arabs, and you will find the situation is pretty grim for Jews all over. We are vastly outnumbered. This is evident when you see how many rallies and riots are organized by Arabs around the world, compared to the few organized by Israelis. There’s just much less of us. If 6 million of us were not murdered during WWII, we could have been 18 ~ 25 million stronger by now.

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Yeah, well, you’re doing a pretty damn crap job.

You have Israeli soldiers feeling like they’re in the SS.

It’s the old victim → perp progression.

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@doctorow, @frauenfelder, @xeni, are you guys ever going to consider backing this damn fine attempt at a solution to like, virtually all the stuff that’s constantly bothering you, and us? Or even acknowledge it?

FFS. Help it gather some momentum, please.

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OK then. The document may be accurate, I don’t know, but providing an IDF link is a little off kilter. Yes, Hamas appears to be using the Palestinian population as human shields. I understand how that works.

The world has been exposed to the holocaust. 30% of my history education from age 8-16 was spent on it. It is a repulsive, disgusting tragedy. The imagery is seared into my mind, the knowledge of how it came about imprinted, and the burning desire to never allow it, or any similar catastrophe, again, ignited. Powerless me.

I don’t disagree. Please address the Israeli actions. When the Sec-Gen of the UN openly tells the world Israel was advised of the co-ordinates of the school 17 times, and it is nonetheless shelled, how can we in the world at large tally that with the sense that there must be another way?

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That is so far from the real story,

  • Israelis are indoctrinated from a real young age that the Army is awesome, and you should be patriotic and do your god damn best in the Army.

  • Israeli children are not taught Arabic, instead all the focus is on English.

  • The media teaches the public that Palestinian life is disposable, how many cover stories in the paper in the last few days about the life torn apart by losing fallen soldiers? How many cover stories about the dead children in this war? Zero.

  • The Israeli press loves printing stories about how “the world is against Israel” and the UN … AGAIN … came up with yet another anti Israel resolution.

A lot of this adds up to … we Israelis are doing the right thing :tm: and they are doing the wrong thing and trying to kill us. I have even heard the crazy justification that Assad pulls off these numbers on a weekend and nobody cares, so what is the big deal when Israelis do.

I wonder, is it right to deliver bullets in the head to an entire family of bullies when a bully kicks you in the nuts.

Its a region of the world full of religious nutbags, I could not run away fast enough, but I think it is very important that Israelis realise they are also perpetrators of terror through government policies and have better awareness about what they are really doing if any kind of solution will ever be found, which I doubt will be in my lifetime.

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While I don’t have tons of hope, when I hear about all these things happening it does kind of hurt realizing the suffering we’re failing to prevent by not getting this option out there.

It won’t work for everyone, only the people who are willing to live their lives without ruining other peoples’ …but I do think there are a lot of us.

Right now everyone’s trapped, and while this wasn’t designed specifically to let impoverished people escape war and tragedy (it was initially just to offer up a way for those of us in the west to live amazing lives while taking over the world using our excessive productivity), a brain is a brain and a Palestinian mother or those poor kids who are coming across the border are just as valuable as a citizen-employee as any American…and honestly they deserve it more and would appreciate the opportunity.

How DO we get other options on the table? How do we get other ideas out there so that they can compete on their merits?

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Even if you accept that Hamas is using human shields - I mean, Amnesty International has been skeptical, but I’m sure they’re far less trustworthy than IDF - there still needs to be the choice to shoot through them.

Israel is not a rabid dog that can’t control its actions, and I doubt it went in ignorant of the damage it would cause. People decided on an invasion killing three-digit numbers of civilians, justified by a threat of single-digit numbers that were being managed in better ways - ways that weren’t giving terrorists countless more childless parents, orphans, and homeless to recruit from.

This was not an acceptable reaction, and you can tell because you don’t even try to justify the decision, you try to wash Israel’s hands of it.

Instead we get the same old strawmen. Israel is fighting for its existence; never mind that it is not the one that currently accepts a two-state solution or is facing the real prospect of thousands of deaths. The blockaded ghetto it faces now is exactly the same as the armies it faced before; they’re all Arabs after all.

And of course anyone who criticizes Israel must sympathize with Hamas, never mind how many of us absolutely condemn them. Because this is a cartoon conflict, and everyone has to be on one side or the other. It’s simply impossible to hate people who kill Israelis and people who kill Palestinians.

These arguments would be jokes if it weren’t for the fact that they concern real massacres. You say Israeli children are indoctrinated for peace not war; I hope so, but you’re showing yourself to be a solid counter-example.

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You couldn’t be further from the truth.

  • Arabic was taught in schools. I was taught Arabic in school myself in Israel.
  • It’s true that Arabic classes are almost gone from schools, but who is to blame? Israel? I don’t think so. Israel certainly showed the correct initiative in the beginning, but after the first Intifada, this support for Arabic started waning.
  • Yes, we learn that the Army is awesome, and saved our lives countless times (which is true!)
  • The media constantly criticizes loss of human life on both sides, with critics of the army called “traitors” by some, but there are always extremists in every country. The difference is that Israeli extremists don’t wage Jihad.
  • It’s absolutely true that “the world is against Israel”, we don’t have to read stories about that in the media to know. Even if the world is not explicitly “against”, they are at the very least not “for” Israel. At the very least if you look at the Arab countries that are on the UN panel, they certainly never do anything “good” for Israel, and constantly try to fail it.

Israel is not a perpetrator of terror through government policies. The Israeli government has a responsibility to:

  1. Keep the population alive
  2. Prevent the loss of any further lands (hey Israel is tiny already, and it needs its buffer zones against missiles)
  3. Maintain a country where Jews around the world feel safe coming home to

As such, it needs to do what it can to achieve the above. Fortunately, it does it in as humane a way as possible. Unfortunately, Hamas tactics create horrible images of dead women and children (see their “Urban Warfare” guide which I posted on this thread). If the world was automatically “for” Israel, it would see through this tactic. However the world is automatically “against” Israel, and as a result tends to sympathize with the families of the dead. Heck, I sympathize myself. I wouldn’t want to be a human shield for any reason, and certainly not for some stupid piece of land.

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It isn’t really just Palestine against Israel here. Do you really think Palestine has the resources to manufacture rockets and dig tunnels? This is Iran and Qatar and who knows who else, funding this entire thing and pushing for it to happen silently behind the scenes. There is an Arab/Muslim “task force” comprised of rich Arab countries and leaders, who finance the training and the weapons. Israel is just the first step in their plan. Their atomic bombs, which they are diligently working to build an arsenal of, they are saving for the “big player”: America. But they may not even have to use those bombs; look at Europe, it is already islamified almost entirely. Do some homework on the subject and you’ll see a pretty grim picture revealing itself to you. Don’t be lazy, read up.

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If you were a parent, and you had two options:

  1. Send troops into that school: your child has a 90% risk of dying.
  2. Ask the population in that area to leave, and bomb the hell out of it: your child has 0% chance of dying.

Now, if you are a Jihadist, you send your child to die because it’s OK to die.
However if you are an Israeli, you don’t want your child to die. You want him to grow up, attend university, become a scientist and help cure cancer or aids, raise a family and give you grandchildren.

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Wow. I guess that’s how you justify mass killings, by accepting anything you ever hear that makes Muslims sound scary? Because a lot of things you say sound off, but this makes it clear that you don’t live on a planet that even resembles mine.

I live on Earth, where the European union has something on the order of 4% muslim population and a number of countries that discriminate against them in more or less overt ways, and is so far from islamified that calling it that would show you either have no ability to reason from evidence, or have been soaked in propaganda.

It also has a country called Israel that some countries uncritically condemn, and other countries provide a great deal of material support. And it has these things called ethics and rules of war that mean it’s neither humane to use human shields, nor to shoot through hundreds of them to nail the odd terrorist.

Where are you from, Ariannus?

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I wish I could believe everything you wrote. I live on Planet Earth, just like you, but we see two different things. I see the riots in Paris, and I am mortified. I see the riots in the UK and I am mortified. I see the massive army that Iran is assembling, and their calls to burn the west, and I am mortified. I see the Iranian attempts to build a bomb, and I am mortified. Those things have a tendency to escalate rapidly, and I don’t want my children to experience WWIII. Can you honestly tell me it could never happen?

If what you say is even partially true, and I am willing to accept that it is, given some evidence, then it would certainly fill me with hope.

For the record, I do not think Muslims are inherently evil or scary. I lived in a 99% Islamic country for many years, and I have many great friends among them. However I do recognize that many of them, for one reason or another, are extremely poor and uneducated, and weak minds are easy to sway and brainwash.

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@chenille and @skaag, I think the link in the conversation that is missing is what you each consider “islamified” to mean.

To me, Islamified means: mosques are erected all over the place, where there was once a western culture. It means women who wear revealing clothing are raped or cursed or driven away. It means Muslim women are suddenly no longer allowed to wear pants, or have to wear Hijab or worse, cover every millimeter of their skin, or not even leave the house. It means entire streets are closed during prayer hours so muslims can pray on the street. It means the Islamic culture that Muslims ran away from, is imported into a western place, until it becomes as horrible and oppressive as the place they ran away from (which is pretty ridiculous really).

So, by erecting mosques it drives out Western culture? And you believe this has happened in all of Europe?

I’ve been to a street in New York City that was closed to allow Muslims to pray. It was outside an Episcopal Church. Is New York now Islamified?

These things can share space and not take away from each other.

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But you’ve hit the nail on the head.

Where do they go? Is Israel going to provide a comfortable environment for them? A nurturing, learning, hopeful environment? Is Israel going to educate and patiently explain how one sovereign nation can assault another with sophisticated weaponry without it actually being war?

No, Israel is not going to. It’s ‘someone else’s problem’. It’s facile, a half-tired sop to the media.

These tunnels - why doesn’t Israel simply drill holes into the ground every 50 cm along the border to find them?

Honestly, I’m not on either side, but the mounting statistics - the death and destruction, the harm and extinction of young, innocent lives, have these no effect on you? None? Is there not a moment of pause, of nausea? Can you manage personally to constantly deflect your mind from the images of shredded people? I cannot. And a deep sadness comes over me; I see youthful Israelis cheering rocket launches, clapping and laughing, and I preview yet more decades of this awfulness. The cycle continues.

Edit: just to refresh: The UN reports that fully 1/3 of Palestinians killed by the Israeli assault are children.

“Between 8 July and 2 August 2014 (up until 11:00), at least 296 Palestinian children were reported killed as a result of airstrikes and shelling by Israel aerial, naval and ground forces,” it said.

Let’s have a conversation about asymmetric warfare.

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Don’t exaggerate what I said, and don’t make the mistake of being passive about this. I don’t think you understand what you’re dealing with here, like many in the west.

Yes, They do start friendly, until they are no longer friendly. It starts by using a bit of public space, then it starts by little pushes to Sharia law, such as not allowing dogs in muslim taxis. Slowly Sharia laws take root, women are no longer allowed to wear what they want. At first it’s just the muslim women. Later you have a “muslim” street, where western women better not enter unless they are completely covered (because, respect, you know). And if one of them is raped, then “what did she expect? she was in a Muslim street!”.

You don’t understand, this is a one way street. They do not integrate, they convert and transform. Radical Islam is a “transformation” platform, by design. You are making a grave mistake if you think they are your friends. And one might say “Well, so what if I become Muslim one day? I will still be alive and kicking”. And while that might be true, you’d be subjected to thought police, you would certainly not be allowed to be gay, and the slight misdemeanor could get you stoned to death.

Okay, I’ll use your exact words:
"look at Europe, it is already islamified almost entirely.‘’
"To me, Islamified means: mosques are erected all over the place, where there was once a western culture. ‘’

You are saying that Europe has mosques almost all over the place and has almost entirely driven out western culture.

You should check out Malta (it’s in Europe). Almost entirely Catholic (95-98 percent) but the word for God in the local language is Allah. These things can coexist.

And, on a side note, I’m a lot less worried in New York becoming Islamified than I am the US becoming Christified.

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I live in an area of the US that has just about the highest concentration of Arabs outside of the middle east. What you’re describing doesn’t have the slightest correlation with everyday reality here. They came here to find economic opportunity and raise their families. By the third generation, pretty much every immigrant group that’s come to the States is nearly 100% assimilated. I’m not worried about them in the slightest.

My greater concern is the same shared by @SteampunkBanana. We have much more to worry about with the Christofascists than we do with transplanted Muslims.

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