Israel won't let the Western media into Gaza (who are in turn suing Israel in court to get in), and it's pretty obvious why. Would the Nazis have wanted the media to record what was going on in the Warsaw Ghetto while they were assaulting the Jews? Of course not. You don't allow cameras to pan around when you have something ugly to hide. Fortunately an Al Jazeera English news team DID get into Gaza, and the following video is just a snippet of what Palestinians are going through now as the razing of Gaza continues. Multiply this by a hundred to get an idea of what is happening daily now in the Gaza strip at the hands of Israel's high tech bombs, rockets, missiles and artillery, with massive payloads.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Nowhere to run for those trapped in Gaza - 30 Dec 08
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4 comments:
Egypt controls the border crossing between Egypt and Gaza. News crew can cross from Egypt to Gaza. Is Egypt hiding the events on behalf of Israel?
You may want to dial back on the "Nazi" rhetoric, lest you trigger Godwin's law. I think a more fruitful comparison would be with the break up of Yugoslavia. Even that comparison in inexact, because there is no evidence that the Israelis are targeting civilians indescriminately, only that they are hitting civilians too close to Hamas installations.
If you study the German assault on the Warsaw Ghetto, you will note that their assault was not completely indiscriminate either, but rather block by block razing of buildings where resistance forces were the strongest. In Gaza, Hamas is the resistance, but also the government that serves the daily needs of the people, so "decapitating" Hamas directly hurts the people. Moreover, if say, hypothetically, Russia or China, attacked America and bombed our police stations and city halls, would we think that was an attack on military installations or on civilian installations? In my mind, targeting police cadets at a graduation ceremony is attacking civilians.
It has now become known that Israel has planning this assault for six months. Their goal all along has been to destroy Hamas, just like their goal had been to destroy Hezbollah when they invaded Lebanon. So, they were never serious about negotiating peace and needed the ceasefire to break down to have a pretext to launch their latest attack. The ultimate goal of the Israeli State may be, if you listen to their Right-Wing's rhetoric, to drive the Palestinians completely out of Gaza and the West Bank, and then to expel all Arab Israeli citizens.
To formatted_dad:
Everyday life in Gaza becomes an assault on the people there due to deliberate, concentration camp conditions, Gaza the giant open-air prison, so to suggest that Israel has some concern for civilians is cynical at best. It is no secret that one of Israel's goals is to make life as miserable as possible for Palestinians.
Israel implicitly believes in collective punishment and disproportionate responses to attacks. How many Israeli civilians had died from the renewal of rocket attacks by Hamas in November and December BEFORE Israel's Dec 26 assault? Answer: ZERO. There were several injuries. So ZERO versus close to 400 dead and approaching two thousand injuried so far is not what you would call, exactly, an eye for an eye, is it, to refer to Torah Law? There have been four deaths from INCREASED Hamas rocket attacks since December 26, so actually the assault has backfired thus far in the stated goal of protecting Israeli citizens.
Moreover, is slaughtering police cadets at a graduation not an assault on civilians, or however many civil servants have been killed in attacks on government infrastructure? How many members of Hamas's military brigades have been slain I wonder. I bet not very many. So the assault has backfired in that regard.
By the way, I don't condone Hamas's attacks on civilians and have said they are counterproductive, but I don't buy that for one minute that Israel goes out of its way to avoid civilian casualties, not from a government that deliberately left a million cluster bombs splattered throughout Lebanon on purpose in the last days of their failed invasion there.
To completely "decapitate" Hamas, Israel will have to invade Gaza and attack the resistance, street by street, and then impose martial law on a million people while they install their own military government or put the largely discredited, corrupt, subservient PLO back in power. Nothing but death, bloodshed and pain in that direction, with unknown consequences for everyone. Of course hatred never conquers hatred anyway, it only engenders more hatred.
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