I don’t know if it means anything to you or not, but there are people in Japan saying tefilah for the safety of you, your family and your neighbors right now.
According to the NPR story I heard last week Hamas did not participate in the cease fire because it did not trust the Egyptian government. Apparently Egypt did not consult Hamas in the matter.
Except that now its the Philistines using slings to fight against a vastly superior enemy.
You’ve skipped over the whole point of the comment, which was entirely about results and not at all about intentions. Sure, a thousand deaths is tragic for all involved. Hundreds of thousands of deaths, which would be the result if the superior military power in this conflict exercised the type of evil behavior that the (thank God) inferior one does, would be hundreds of times more tragic.
Look the word up in any English dictionary.
Nonetheless, Hamas has NO friends among all the Arab countries who lost chunks of land to Israel in all those wars they started. They appear to be giving tacit approval to the Israelis to deal with Hamas as it should be dealt with.
I think that Israel is carefully considering what its many purported opponents are actually doing (not much) and paying little attention to the usual chorus of international yammerers. I would likely do the same.
Maybe Israel should shut down the Iron Dome. Media coverage of hundreds of dead Jewish children would even up the propaganda war, amirite??
Nah, never happen. The media coverage, I mean.
Calling stuff evil in discussions like this is pointless and intellectually lazy. Either that or it’s invoking religion, which is even worse.
See, what you’re doing here is creating a theoretical (a.k.a. imaginary) scenario that’s extrapolated from the supposed intentions of the Palestinians.
You’re not saying they have done this, nor that there’s a real threat that they might. You’re claiming that they would do this in some bizarro world where circumstances were radically different. And so you want them to be judged on those intentions, rather than what they’ve actually done.
Similarly, supporters of Israel’s war doctrine often claim that they don’t intend to kill so many civilians, but since terrorists hide behind “human shields”, it just ends up happening. The implication here is that since Israel’s supposed intentions were good, they should be judged on what they were trying to do, not what they actually did.
This kind of reasoning leads to strange and disturbing positions. Like the idea that it’s justified to take military action against people simply because they hate you. Or that if you mourn the deaths you cause as truly tragic, you are somehow less culpable for them.
Killing is killing. Each death is a dead person. It needs to stop. And since the Israeli military is doing almost all the killing, they particularly need to stop.
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One thing that has always confused me regarding Israel & all of the trouble it’s existence in the current format has caused.
It is often stated that it exists to protect the existence of the Jewish people.
But since when has putting all the eggs into a basket like that been a good idea?
The fact is that as societies emerge & evolve, diaspora has become better & better protection as time goes on.
After all, unless a World Govt were to emerge & decide to try & eliminate this culture, that religion or that ethnicity, diaspora prevents absolutely the end of the existence of the Jewish peoples. Further, should such a force to emerge, Israel could not hope to defend it’s people.
Do you want to know where Jews are safe? En Masse? Without having to kill others?
It’s North America. It’s most of the Western World. It’s also in most developed countries as well as some undeveloped countries. It’s most of the world with some few notable & obvious exceptions.
It is not Israel.
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And part of those measures are destroying the launchers themselves. Iron Dome is an extremely expensive defense system compared to the unguided rockets being used against it. Your argument as applied to WW2 would mean that each side should’ve simply concentrated on shooting down incoming bombers instead of themselves bombing the factories and supply lines that produced them because civilians happened to be working those factories.
Modern war is about economics as much as anything else. WW2 was won in large part by breaking the industrial back of Germany, destroying dams and depriving them of electrical power to run their factories, apart from bombing the factories themselves to halt the production of military hardware that was to be used against the Allies. And obviously there would be civilian casualties. (America got very lucky by having its factories on a separate continent where there was never any danger of attack)
The objective of war, once begun, is to win with minimal cost to your side, not for some bullshit glory or rules. More so when only side seems to care about following them. Israel’s only optimal response would be to glass the rest of the hostile Middle East , but far from doing that they’re actually warning locals to evacuate before the counter fire. In which war until now have you seen that happen?
Key words - whenever possible. You’re sounding as though Israel is deliberately shelling places where children live, and not because the same rocket launchers are sited there.
You still don’t say why Hamas isn’t held to the same standard for preserving human life when they have no qualms about sending suicide bombers apart from the rocket bombardment. Last time I checked, Hamas wasn’t firing on exclusively military targets either.
Groups like Hamas are committed to the destruction of Israel, and of Jews worldwide. They’re not doing it to ‘liberate’ Palestine or anything else.
And finally it’s fucking hypocritical of the liberal press to wail about Gaza when 200k Arabs have died in the ISIS run conflict in Iraq/Syria. Where is the indignation towards Hamas, a terrorist organization that is cynically using the people of Palestine to further its goal of destroying Israel?
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For real? Just about every mention of Hamas on this or the other thread has pointed out that they’re horrible. There is no love for Hamas here. But you keep arguing as if there were, because it apparently doesn’t occur to you that people could object more to an organization killing dozens of times as many civilians without being pro-Hamas.
Or hey, ISIS, you sure never see anyone condemn them! That’s not an idiotic strawman, no sir. Don’t we know there have been casualties, and even a person killed? If Israel has the restraint not to “glass” the rest of the Middle East over that - that’s usually spelled g-e-n-o-c-i-d-e, by the way - why would anyone think they deserve less than our full endorsement?
And then we can wonder how, when Israel is so nice it even gives people the chance to evacuate to who-cares-where before destroying all their infrastructure, disgusting hate-mongers like Hamas keep getting power in the first place. Sure is a mystery. Sure wouldn’t help save even Israeli lives to figure out why, and take measures that might gradually reduce rather than renew the conflict.
This isn’t a war the way WW2 is, rexdude, it is a case of two people who are stuck with each other. If you can’t see the differences that entails, and you’re too busy assuming everyone who condemns one side supports the other to understand explanations otherwise, we are done here.
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Not sure why everyone is getting all anxious. After all, John Kerry is ON THIS.
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