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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
I guess I missed it, I am sure that Kamiya wanted to decry the missile which landed in an Israeli Kindergarten yesterday. Perhaps he is in favor of bombing at Kindergartens but he is disappointed because Israel builds bomb shelters for its civilians and Hamas builds shelters for its fighters and hides behind their civilians.
For anyone who actually cares about what is really happening in the middle east, there is a good article in today's NY Times explaining the Israeli point of view and why it is a just war to try to stop people who bomb Kindergartens.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/world/middleeast/13israel.html?_r=1&hp
Of course you would never see something explaining Israel's point of view in Salon only the rantings of people like Kimaya or Cole who don't care about dead Israelis.
Nearly seventy ago, in the course of World War II, a heinous crime was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than a thousand days, a gang of extremists called “the Red Army” held the millions of the town’s inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population centers. The Germans had no alternative but to bomb and shell the population and to impose a total blockade, which caused the death of hundreds of thousands.
Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins. They called it the Blitz.
This is the description that would now appear in the history books – if the Germans had won the war.
Absurd? No more than the daily descriptions in the Israeli and US corporate media, which are being repeated ad nauseam: the Hamas terrorists use the inhabitants of Gaza as “hostages” and exploit the women and children as “human shields”, they leave us no alternative but to carry out massive bombardments, in which, to our deep sorrow, thousands of women, children and unarmed men are killed and injured.
In this war, as in any modern war, propaganda plays a major role. The disparity between the forces, between the Israeli army - with its airplanes, gunships, drones, warships, artillery and tanks - and the few thousand lightly armed Hamas fighters, is one to a thousand, perhaps one to a million. In the political arena the gap between them is even wider. But in the propaganda war, the gap is almost infinite.
Almost all the Western media initially repeated the official Israeli propaganda line. They almost entirely ignored the Palestinian side of the story, not to mention the daily demonstrations of the Israeli peace camp. The rationale of the Israeli government (“The state must defend its citizens against the Qassam rockets”) has been accepted as the whole truth. The view from the other side, that the Qassams are a retaliation for the siege that starves the one and a half million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, was not mentioned at all.
Only when the horrible scenes from Gaza started to appear on Western TV screens, did world public opinion gradually begin to change.
True, Western and Israeli TV channels showed only a tiny fraction of the dreadful events that appear 24 hours every day on Aljazeera’s Arabic channel, but one picture of a dead baby in the arms of its terrified father is more powerful than a thousand elegantly constructed sentences from the Israeli army spokesman. And that is what is decisive, in the end.
War – every war – is the realm of lies. Whether called propaganda or psychological warfare, everybody accepts that it is right to lie for one’s country. Anyone who speaks the truth runs the risk of being branded a traitor.
Many of the posters reflexively defend Israeli actions and equate any criticism of said actions with support for Hamas and its ideology but they are missing the point.
The point is that Israel has the option of using carrots in addition to sticks to de-escalate the conflict and de-legitimize Hamas and its tactics. Instead of doing that Israel wields a big stick (restriction on movement, blockade, etc...) and an even bigger stick (aerial bombardment, military operations). This pushes the population into the arms of Hamas and allows them burnish to their credentials as resisters. Gary Kamiya thinks these are unintended consequences that Israel should avoid. I believe that Gary is wrong on that and that this policy is deliberate. Think about it! If you were Israel would you rather face a Ghandi-like character or some fundamentalist villain straight out of central casting that is foaming at the mouth about how he's going to exact terrible revenge and destroy your state even though he doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of achieving either goal?
Israel likes to pretend that any group attacking it is the second coming of the Nazi party and therefore it has no choice but to use maximum force while conveniently ignoring the fact that what made the Nazis so dangerous was that they had control of the formidable German army and the equally formidable German industrial machine. Take a look at Gaza and the West Bank and see how that analogy breaks down. They can't even deal with their sewage...
Just to put things in perspective. If Israel is so concerned about the 20 people that were killed by the Qassam home-made firecrackers over the last 8 years then they should start bombing careless and speeding motorists and anybody who lives near them because they account for roughly 8,000 deaths per year in Israel.
First David W. while I agree with the bulk of what you write you are really are off the mark with your claim that Britian did not bomb Dublin or Belfast in response to the IRA. I suggest you look up the "littlejohn brothers", British agents sent to plant bombs in Dublin with the goal of killing civilians. Two dozen people were killed by those bombs. It succeeded in its goal of creating a backlash against the IRA in the South leading to the passing of draconic anti-terrorism laws. In the North the British secret service secretly controlled Loyalist gangs that shot, bombed and tortured Catholics. This has all come out in the years since the ceasefire.
As for Jonathan in Tel Avi what a nerve for a Zionist to call anyone a terrorist. Your hateful little State started out by the terrorists of Irgun who bombed hotels and then moved on to mass terror to drive off the Palastinians. What a shame that you treat the Palastinians as vermin when in fact they are your closest cousins. Genetic research has shown that Palastinians are just Jews who converted to Islam and Christianity. So your racism is by definition "Anti-Semitism". You will burn in hell along with those others fans of collective punishment the Nazis. For there is really no moral difference between you.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
