Palestine

[Funkyalligator]

Simply put the terrorists in the middle east perform their acts because of religious beliefs more than political beliefs unlike Timothy McVeigh or even the IRA who perform the terrorist acts because of political beliefs more than religious beliefs.

[The Evil Genius]

By the way - have we ever met? Cause you seem to know me better than I do. And hell, I live with me every day. Perhaps maybe if you knew me better - then you would change your labeling of me. Oh well though - guess I can't make everybody like me

[Art]

Originally posted by The Evil Genius

Art,

Please reread what I wrote - I never said the actions taken by the country of Israel. I said that all 3 parties, the Christians, the Jews, and the Arabs wee guilty of terrorism.

EG,

I read what you wrote. I copied what you wrote. I'll paste here what you wrote. You wrote, "I know this isnt a popular position...but I think its worth noting that the terrorism is coming from both sides (actually all 3 - the Arab nations, Israel, and the Christian based groups)."

You didn't say that all three parties, the Christians, the Jews and the Arabs were guilty of terrorism. You said all three, the Arab nations, Israel and Christian based groups were guilty. That's precisely what you said.

If you meant something else, then fine. But, other than the conspiracy by the Jewish-held media that prevents any comment about the Jewish terrorism in the area, you really don't have any point here.

[The Evil Genius]

Those Jews are clever and since they control all media in the world dozens of bombings they are utilizing are simply going unspoken by anyone. I knew the Jews ruled the world, but, I had sometimes forgotten to factor that in when I speak with someone else.

Nice one, try to make me look bigoted. Except - I NEVER SAID that and you know it.

Let me simplify this for you - since I don't appear to be conveying what I think very well to you - or others.

My question is - Yes or No - do you believe that either Christains and or Jews in Israel have taken terrorist actions, not as an official ac tion of Isreal, towards Arabs?

If you think no - then that is fine - its your belief and, on record, I do not agree.

If you think there have been terrorist acts on the behalf of Christians and/or Jews in Israek - then that is what I am saying.

Do I have media stories to back this up - no, I do not not at my disposal have stories. Nor do I know if such stories exist.

Would this be the 1st time that no media stories existed about terrorist actions that occured? I do not know. Perhaps, but I dont know either way.

[Art]

Originally posted by The Evil Genius

By the way - have we ever met? Cause you seem to know me better than I do. And hell, I live with me every day. Perhaps maybe if you knew me better - then you would change your labeling of me. Oh well though - guess I can't make everybody like me

Importantly, I like you a rather lot. People confuse a furious debate with dislike. I still like Terry too, even though he's a bit sour on me for beating him about the head and shoulders the way I do. I didn't so much like Kefka because he was a nut, but, in general, a well-spoken person of any belief is going to appeal to me a great deal.

As for knowing you, I can say I pretty clearly know you only from your words. The views you stand behind define you even if you sometimes mouth other words to limit that. Nothing you stand for can honestly be stated as a "middle" view. You are not middle of the road. I'm certain you have a handful of strong conservative beliefs, though, I'm positive they've never been demonstrated. I am strongly conservative and I probably have an occasional lapse and have a liberal stance from time to time on something. But, simply put, you are what you are. I don't need to meet you to know you. So, if you're confused, then perhaps I do know you better than you do

[The Evil Genius]

Art,

My bad on that - I guess I did write Isreal when I meant jewish peoples.

[Kilmer17]

I dont think that there are NOT Jews or Christians that would or have committed terrorists acts against muslims, arabs, palestinians et al. But I am sure that their are not networks of people whose main purpose and goal is to kill people of other religions or ethnicity. However, what would the Jewish equivilent of Hamas be? And are they supported by the Israeli govt the way Hamas is supported by the PLO and other Arab muslim nations? And what is the Christian equivalent of Hezbollah? Or Islamic Jihad? And outside a lone nutcase like McViegh, what have they done?

I know this isnt a popular statement, but I say lets give them the JIhad they so desperately want.

[Art]

EG,

Do you know how ridiculous that post sounded?

You have no evidence or account of any specific act of terrorism conducted by anyone in Israel against anyone outside of Israel and yet you think it's imperative that we all recognize that all sides involved are guilty?

Is it THAT difficult for you to believe that one side really is guilty? You're position is akin to saying the woman asked for it when she was raped, or, a murder victim is somehow equally complicit in the crime. On one had you have thoroughly documented fanaticism and atrocities conducted by people of a certain religious and ethnic background who are sponsored by others of the same, and on the other hand you have no documentation or evidence of fanaticism or atrocities, but, they must be happening, so therefore everyone's guilty?

This is ludicrous. Do I believe citizens with Israel have ever done something terrible against an Arab or Muslim? I can't say as I do, but, it is certainly well within the realm of possibility and just as certainly, irrelevant. The murder victim is never equally as guilty as the murderer.

[@DCGoldPants]

alright guys. There are two types of groups here.

Out in the open to the world (mostly) Israel who march Tanks and Guns into area's with a mission that is made public

and the secret "Terrorist" groups who are being funded by their leaders to kill not the other sides military leaders but to take out children.

[Art]

Bufford,

Don't forget the third group. The third group of ultra-secret Jews running around indiscriminantly killing Arabs and Muslims while being totally undetected or reported upon by any media outlet in the world.

That is the group we need to watch.

[Funkyalligator]

Currently I don't believe there are any Militant Jewish groups that terrorize the Arabs but....they have existed in the past i.e. the JDL which blew up the King David Hotel during the British control of the area pre-1947. There have been a few...very few instances of Jewish settlers/regular Jews attacking and killing Arabs but this is on par with similar attacks by regular arabs against jews(not these attacks are okay but they are to be expected) I do disagree with the Israeli policy of opening up new Jewish settlements in the West Bank so that Israel can extend its territory but these bombings need to stop.

I've got a good idea...whenever the Hamas, Jihad etc. announces who the suicide bomber was the Israelis should go in and kill the whole family. This will take care of two things one it gets rid of people that actively support the movement, it makes people think twice about becoming a suicide bomber and it creates problems for the PR people for Hamas, Jihad, etc.

[The Evil Genius]

I do not know the validity of this...but it sheds some light into how some feel that both, or all, sides are tainted in this conflict...

it could be just liberal bias of the press, cause according to Art , like the Jews, they control the media.

Anyways..perhaps this is state sponsered terrorism...which doesn't make it terrorism to some here. I dunno.

By Kathryn Kingsbury

August 14, 2001

The morning after I returned from a two-week trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories, I awoke to appalling news.

A suicide bombing by a member of Hamas, a Palestinian liberation group, killed at least 15 people, including several children, last Thursday during lunch hour at a crowded pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem. The bombing came in retaliation for an Israeli attack July 31 that killed eight people, including two Hamas members, in the West Bank city of Nablus. Hamas is one of several Palestinian groups seeking to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip through political and military means.

I had just come back from a two-week trip with Christian Peacemaker Teams, a pacifist group that documents human rights abuses and works with Israelis and Palestinians to promote peaceful and just means for ending the ongoing warfare.

Before I left, several well-intentioned acquaintances politely informed me I was crazy. "Palestinians don't know any way other than violence," they said. "They kill Jews left and right, after all that the Israelis have done for them. Pacifism won't work in the Middle East."

This perception is understandable. As Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres so astutely pointed out after Thursday's atrocity in Jerusalem, the world has allowed rogue militants to speak for all of Palestine. "If we say we won't talk under fire, it means every mad gunman can decide there will be no dialogue."

At the same time, we ignore Palestine's lively peace movement - you, dear reader, have likely never heard of it, even though it works at a grass-roots level in every Palestinian community throughout the occupied territories.

And by our silence, we condone Israel's own atrocities against the Palestinian people. The Israeli death toll from the current 10-month conflict is around 140. In the same period, more than 550 Palestinians have been killed. As with the Israeli deaths, many of the dead Palestinians were civilians who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

That's right. Middle East terrorism goes both ways.

Aweek ago Monday, I visited a desert community of about 75 cave-dwelling shepherds near the West Bank town of Yatta. Only two weeks before, the Israeli Defense Forces had bulldozed every one of the community's centuries-old caves, burying clothing, cars and even live sheep under tons of rock. When the Red Cross supplied emergency tents to the families, the Israelis returned with their heavy machinery and buried those as well.

An elderly shepherd named Jaber led me from crumbled cave to crumbled cave. It was early in the afternoon, a time when most Middle Easterners stay indoors or under a canopy. But Jaber and I had no choice. The entrances to the caves were blocked by jagged stones, crumpled cars and torn tents. His face glowed a deep pink from days on end of living under the desert sun with almost no access to shade.

He led me past his surviving goats and sheep, several of whom were gnawing on a fallen tree, to the cave where he had kept them at night and during the harsher parts of day. Through a gap in the stones, we could see buried containers of feed. "Everything is in there," he said in Arabic. "I have no food to give them."

The Israeli government has justified the cave demolitions, saying that they were built without the required construction permits. Israel has used this process to block virtually all Palestinian construction - schools, homes, you name it - on these lands.

And it regularly demolishes structures that predate the 1967 permit law in order to make way for Israeli colonies in the West Bank that are illegal under international law. In its occupation of the Palestinian territories, Israel continuously violates the Fourth Geneva Convention, which outlaws attacks against civilians and forbids permanent settlements by any nation outside of its boundaries, even though Israel itself pushed for this convention and signed onto it.

These home demolitions are only one part of Israel's ongoing policy of harassing, impoverishing, torturing and killing Palestinian civilians in an effort to force them to flee their homeland.

Take the two children and several bystanders who were killed as "collateral damage" during the Israeli attack two weeks ago in Nablus. Or the Palestinian pacifist, Isaac Saada, who was murdered by the Israeli Defense Forces last month in Bethlehem. Or my Palestinian friend who was stopped by an Israeli security officer as he drove on an ostensibly Palestinian-controlled road, ordered out of his car, beaten and threatened with death. Or my encounter early last week with a group of Israeli soldiers who surrounded my group's Palestinian taxi drivers and calmly discussed kidnapping and torturing them, forgetting that the Israeli peace activists among us would understand Hebrew.

The policy of terror is working. Jacob, a Palestinian friend of mine who lives in Beit Jala, a village just outside of Bethlehem, recently told me of his plans to move to Bolivia. The tourist-dependent Bethlehem economy has crashed since the beginning of this intifada.

"There's no work," he told me. "And I'm sick of this shooting." He waved his hand in the direction of Gilo, a walled Israeli settlement that stands like a fortress on a nearby hill. Besides housing Israelis, Gilo holds a military outpost that regularly barrages Bethlehem and its surrounding villages with shells and machine gun fire.

The night before, Jacob and I had huddled in a corner room of the house with several other friends as Israeli bullets zipped through the hallway and burst holes in the gas and water tanks on the roof.

Israel claimed that the shelling was in response to Palestinian gunfire. If so, why did the Israeli Defense Forces blanket residential areas with bombs and bullets, rather than targeting the handful of gunmen who were acting in opposition to the majority will of Beit Jala residents?

The Israeli government is as guilty as Palestinian military groups of waging war against civilians. But unlike Hamas or Islamic Jihad, it is using U.S. taxpayers' money to do so - to the tune of $2.23 billion in military aid a year.

It is time for the United States to wake up and hold Israel accountable for its war crimes.

Kathryn Kingsbury is a reporter for The Capital Times.

[The Evil Genius]

But unlike Hamas or Islamic Jihad, it is using U.S. taxpayers' money to do so - to the tune of $2.23 billion in military aid a year.

Of course, I cannot agree with the above quote since we, the US, were a main contributor to these type of factions back in the 1980's. Anything to fight those commies!

[Kilmer17]

Kathryn Kingsbury is a reporter for The Capital Times.

That should read

"Kathryn Kingsbury is a bleeding heart liberal who would have stood with Hanoi Jane if given the chance"

I can start posting stuff from Jewish Weekly, but I think we can agree that their views would be a little slanted as well.

[The Evil Genius]

Agreed.

You know, its easy, when confronted with the opposite of the status quo, to dismiss what is said because of its slant (liberal, conservative, etc). Sometimes there is truth there - sometimes there isn't. Is there any truth to this story?

And yet, when I say that not everthing is being reported about an issue - I am blasted?

Makes me wonder sometimes.

[@DCGoldPants]

You know if Arafat didn't have friends who were selling us oil, the US would of left him out to dry a long time ago. He doesn't do anything but his friends do.

[Art]

EG,

Again, it's really very simple. Terrorism is a word that means something. It can't mean something else to appeal to the self-loathing you well-intentioned liberals are prone to experience. Israel as a country can not commit terrorism. It is possible for Israel as a country to commit a war crime.

But, as we are doing in Afghanistan, the facts are a country that takes to retaliating against an attack against it is merely conducting war operations and civilians will perish. An unintended consequence of using the military to act against a people is that the military is not a scalpal, but a broad sword. Terrorism, is entirely different and intent matters. When Israel, or the U.S., takes to a military exercise in a foreign country, we are going after specific targets that are not civilian targets.

Terrorists target civilians specifically and you know the difference here. Now, that said, the U.S. is the worst country in the history of war at targeting civilian centers. In WWII we specifically killed German civilians to lessen their resolve. Even England came down on us at the time pretty hard for that. The Russians, who were doing the same, were said to have been amazed that after weeks of bombing Dresden, the U.S. planes came in and so destroyed the city and killed 100,000 people that Russian bombs had nothing left to destroy.

But, even that was an act that was and can be understood when taken on by a nation-state fighting a war. Times have changed and it would be difficult to imagine the same type of military as then, and now you see countries like the U.S. and Israel taking some care not to kill innocent people if possible. Some will die and that is the way of it. It is distinctly different than walking onto a crowded bus and killing teenagers.

That your self-loathing is such that you can't see that makes you a pitiable person in this.

[@DCGoldPants]

In Wednesday’s blast, the bomber sprang from a red Audi, dashed past two policemen and set off the explosive, according to police.

Nine people and the bomber were killed, said Jerusalem police chief Mickey Levy. More than 35 were wounded, several critically, rescue workers told army radio. Among the injured was an officer who was chasing the bomber, Levy said. The Audi sped away, disappearing into a Palestinian neighborhood in east Jerusalem, police said.

The explosion in the French Hill neighborhood blew out the back and the sides of the bus stop shelter, leaving just a concrete bench and the roof. An arm and a leg were among the body parts scattered on the street.

The Palestinian Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a militant group that is associated with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s bombing, al-Manar television in Beirut reported.

I haven't heard anything about Israel sending in troops to blow themselves up.

[Ryman of the North]

"You should quit making statements based upon your supositions and you should start formulating opinion based upon the knowledge you possess. One side is targeting innocent people to topple a nation. The other side is a nation targeting the terrorists to topple the terrorists. I didn't realize you were confused by what you are seeing"

Truer words were never spoken!

Kingsbury is simplifying she doesnt report that the dwellings were in a zone that was clearly posted as a no dwelling area only that the big bad israelis were so mean.Nice one sided reporting!

My best friend is a christian from lebanon and he says that there will never be peace in the middle east because the arabs dont want it! on more than one occasion they have proven it! the israelis actually are very good to the arabs in israel but until recently NO suicide bombers came from israel either!

as for the christian terrorists that was the phalange(leb catholics) who had been losing several villages to terrorrist massacres and fought fire with fire. A lot of the atrocities supposedly committed by the israelis were actually committed by other arabs some good books about the conflicts can be found in any public library.

so before forming an opinion read some literature to back that opinion up!

[Darth Tater]

:doh: By the definition Kathryn Kingsbury was using, she would have to condem the aliies in WW2 of terrorism -- Dresden, Tokyo and the A-bomb events. :puke:

In truth, terrorism is often forgiven by the world if the side that uses it wins.

[The Evil Genius]

Here is some more from the NY Post

by Zev Chafets

Turner's Wrong to Treat Mideast Foes as Equals

Talk about bad timing. Yesterday, Ted Turner tells Britain's The Guardian that Israel and the Palestinians are "terrorizing each other" in an unfair fight between a powerful military and poor people "who have nothing."

Within a few hours, Turner's heroic victims blow up an Israeli bus, killing mostly school kids. And not for the first time, Turner comes off sounding like an idiot.

That's not quite fair. Turner may be half nuts, but the CNN founder also happens to be more than half-right. Israelis and Arabs are, indeed, trying to terrorize one another. That this obvious observation is even controversial demonstrates how badly President Bush's euphemistic "war on terror" has degraded political language.

Terror — the threat or use of force to break a hostile population —has been the inescapable part of modern warfare since Sherman burned his way through Georgia. He and Lincoln terrorized the Confederacy into surrender. The Allied leaders terrorized Germany and Japan into capitulation.

Terrorism takes various forms. It can consist of Mau Mau warriors scaring the British out of Kenya with rifles and spears or the Soviet Union decomposing in the face of American nuclear terror that it could no longer plausibly balance. But it always paints a picture of disaster and invites the enemy to see it clearly — and behave accordingly.

That is what the Palestinians have done in the intifadeh — and what the Islamic terrorists did in declaring jihad on America. It is also at the heart of the Israeli invasions of the West Bank and the new American doctrine of preemption.

After Sept. 11, Turner described the hijackers as "brave." That comment, like his Palestinian pronunciamento, caused a stir. But Turner was right. Flying a plane into a building with premeditation is, indeed, an act of bravery. So is blowing yourself up on an Israeli school bus.

But bravery isn't the point. There were brave Nazis, too.

And parity isn't the point, either.

"The Palestinians are fighting with human suicide bombers, that's all they have," says Turner. Presumably, he would like Israel to reply by employing its own suicide bombers on Palestinian buses — and America to dispatch troops to fight the jihad on camelback. That's how baseball works — they knock down your pitcher, you knock down their pitcher.

But war isn't baseball. In real life, if you turn your sons and daughters into bean balls, you invite a Louisville Slugger upside the head.

That's human nature, and it is why Turner's assertion that Israel and the Palestinians are trying to terrorize one another is banal. The real issue — the one he ducks — is what they are doing it for.

The Palestinians are fighting for the eventual destruction of Israel. That's the open objective of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and the implicit meaning of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's demand for a "right of return." Just last week, a Palestinian poll was published showing that a clear majority of the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza regards the extermination of Israel as the proper aim of the intifadeh.

Israel has other ideas. It is willing to accept a ceasefire followed by some form of Palestinian state in most of the occupied territories. But it is also willing — and properly so — to do whatever it takes to make the Palestinians stop blowing up buses. If that means terrorizing the enemy — or even being called a terrorist state by Ted Turner — well, that's the price of survival.

After all, war is hell. In fact, I think Sherman was in Atlanta when he said that.

[luckydevil]

According to Art it would be ok If Native Americans came into his him home and kicked him out because they had a longer claim over the land

[luckydevil]

Lets look at our history. Was this country not founded on the basis of terrorism. To the british we were the savages and the terrorists. The difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist, one who you agree with and one you dont.

[The Evil Genius]

LD,

I don't think Art said quite that.

I think he was/is arguing that Israel's use of terror (targeting specific Muslim civilan areas - he would argue they they aren't doing this though) to deter further terrorism is not, by definition, terrorism.

I respectfully disagree with that opinion.

[Ryman of the North]

OPM you are completly missing the point one is a GOVERNMENT MAKING WAR ON ANOTHER GOVERNMENT THE OTHER IS A SMALL GROUP OF MADMEN WAGING WAR ON INNOCENTS.