israel kills a few more kids

[Daniel]

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/...cle1962692.ece

Gaza children cannot escape as Israel mounts its bloodiest attack in months
By Donald Macintyre in Beit Hanoun
Published: 09 November 2006

Eighteen Palestinian civilians, most of them women and children from the same family, have been killed as they tried to flee a barrage of Israeli artillery shells fired on and around the house where they had been sleeping minutes earlier.

The victims were killed by an estimated 10 to 12 155mm shells which landed on Beit Hanoun less than 24 hours after troops had ended a six-day ground incursion into the northern Gaza town aimed at stopping militants firing Qassam rockets into Israel.

All but one of the dead were members of the Athamneh family and included six children under 16. They were killed when they rushed out into the dirt road beside their four-storey building after the first shell struck, punching a hole two feet in diameter through the roof. Large puddles in the road were still dark with blood five hours after the attack.

The artillery salvo, which began at 5.30am, inflicted the highest single civilian death toll in four months of operations by the Israeli military since Gaza militants seized the Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit. Among the dozens of wounded, 17 people, including three children and six women, were still in intensive care in Gaza City's Shifa hospital last night.

At the mortuary at Kamal Adwan hospital Majdi Saad Athamneh, 37, wept as he wrote down the names of relatives whose corpses he had identified. As a neighbour opened one of the containers to reveal the bodies of his 10-year-old son, Saad, and his brother, Mohammed, 28, Mr Athamneh said he had lost 13 members of his family. He added: "My wife is in the hospital and so is my other son."

Lying in a bed at Al Awda hospital, Haneen Athamneh, 20, said she had finished washing before dawn prayers in their fourth-floor apartment when she heard the explosion from the shell hitting the roof.

She said: "I ran with my husband into the road outside. I was hit by shrapnel on my side. There was smoke and dust everywhere. It was like a fog. It was hard to breathe. There were heads decapitated. I saw my aunt Jamila's leg flying. I tried to help her but she said, 'Run for your life'."

She said Israeli troops had occupied the building for two days during the incursion, in which more than 50 Palestinians * most but not all militants * were killed. "They told us not to worry, they were not going to hurt us, " Ms Athamneh said. "They said they wanted peace. What kind of peace is this?"

At her bedside, her mother, Sarya Basiouny, 62, said: "Yesterday we buried our dead. Today we are burying the dead again." The youngest victim killed was Maysa Athamneh, eight months, who had been sleeping before her father Ramzi, 30, rushed her and his two other children out of the building on hearing the first explosion. Her seven-year-old brother Abdullah lost a leg.

After one hardline Hamas spokesman was quoted calling for a resumption of suicide bombings in retaliation, the exiled Hamas leader Khaled Mashal said in Damascus the faction would retaliate "by deed, not words". The normally more moderate Ghazi Hamad, spokesman for the Hamas cabinet, declared: "Israel believes in killing, and therefore this state should cease to exist."

The Israeli Defence Forces said they had been launching "preventative" shelling in response to Qassam rocket attacks after the Israeli troops' withdrawal from Beit Hanoun on Tuesday. No injuries were reported from the rocket attacks. The IDF said it "regrets any event in which uninvolved [people] are hurt" while insisting that the "responsibility for civilian casualties" lay with factions who launched Qassam rockets " from the shelter of populated areas". But in an implicit explanation that the killings were caused by human or technical error, the military said the artillery fire was "directed at a location distant from the one reportedly hit".

The military inquiry has been entrusted to Maj-Gen Meir Khalifi, who also investigated the deaths of seven members of the Ghalia family in an explosion on a Gaza beach last June. Despite doubts raised over its evidence, including the timeline it gave of Israeli attacks on the day, his report insisted that the IDF was not responsible.

One resident, Usama Ahmed Athamneh, 34, told the independent politician Mustafa Barghouti, who visited the scene of the carnage: "We do not want to see any of Fatah and Hamas. For playing the firecrackers [Qassams] we are getting killed."

In a wave of critical international reaction, King Abdullah of Jordan; the Italian Foreign Minister, Massimo D'Alema, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, described the event as a "massacre".

[claude]

What I find most disturbing about these events is that there never appears to be much concern on the Israeli side that they may have killed innocent people. The implication appears to be that the lives of Palestinians are less valuable.

Now, before anyone jumps on me for not taking into account the dastardly deeds of Hamas et al, let me say that they are murderous bastards as well. But, put yourself in the shoes of the innocent people stuck in the middle. They are most likely poor since Israel has pretty well made sure that they are marginalized economically, they have no political power over Hamas (or any other militants), they would almost certainly be killed if they tried to interfere with Hamas operations. So what are they to do about the situation and why does there not appear to be any sympathy for them from Israel? (Oh yeah, I forgot they're all the same).

[Gentle Giant]

Hamas: "Israel believes in killing."

If it wasn't so ironic, it might even be funny.


I am very saddened by this attack, and I support regime change in Israel. They should be giving Hamas and the PA the space to negotiate a shared government. Instead they appease the most radical and militant factions by continuing to be an offensive enemy rather than a potential peace partner waiting on the sidelines for progress (which, to be fair, we all know is never going to come).

claude, you must know that the issue is more complex than what you've articulated. The Palestinians can elect their own government, but they've still yet to receive a vision of independent statehood that will make them economically self-sufficient and politically integrated into the family of nations. There are any number of ways that successive Palestinian leaders could have made their people's lives safer, healthier, and more successful over the past 20 or 30 years. They haven't done it and they probably never will.


I am also saddened by this news report I read today. This is not my idea of constructive common ground (keep in mind that the ultra-Orthodox in Israel are exempted from the otherwise-mandatory military service):

Jews, Muslims join to fight gay parade
Jerusalem event sparks anger, riots
By Thanassis Cambanis, Globe Staff | November 9, 2006

JERUSALEM -- Ultra-Orthodox Jewish pop singer Benny Elbaz was so angry about the gay pride march planned for tomorrow that he joined forces with a Muslim man he normally would consider an enemy, to sing a duet he composed denouncing the event.

"Jerusalem Will Burn!" Elbaz croons in Hebrew on the single, released the week before the parade. "There will be no gay march!"

Religious Jews and Muslims are on the opposite ends of the political spectrum on most issues, especially over who should control the contested city of Jerusalem, which Israelis and Palestinians both claim as their capital. But Jews, Muslims, and even some Christians have formed a common front against Jerusalem's gay community, whose planned march they say besmirches the city.

"Only this onslaught of homosexual radicalism could bring together such disparate voices," said Rabbi Yehuda Levin, an anti gay activist from Brooklyn, N.Y., who has traveled to Israel several times this year to rally opposition to the gay pride parade.

Levin has joined forces with Tayseer Tamimi, the head judge of the Islamic Sharia court in the West Bank.

"This march is part of the wild campaign against Islam, the doctrine, the holy sites," Tamimi said. "All religions discredit gays . . . because it is against the decent human nature created by God."

In June, Levin and four senior ultra-Orthodox rabbis shared a podium with two Arab-Israeli members of the Knesset to denounce the march.

Islamic religious leaders from the West Bank joined by video link because they are barred by Israel from visiting Jerusalem.

The religious anti gay activists said the gay pride event has prompted new dialogue between them that extends to a broader discussion of religion and politics. The anti gay activists believe their cause has opened up a valuable avenue of dialogue between the Islamic and Jewish religious leadership.

Elbaz formed another of the unlikely partnerships that has characterized the vociferous and at times violent campaign. "I decided to sing with an Arab singer to emphasize that both religions are opposed to the gay parade," Elbaz said. "No religion will have it, especially not in the Holy City."

"Politicians will never make peace," Elbaz said. "But maybe we can."

But the rhetoric of the anti gay religious and secular leaders -- mostly Jewish, but some Muslim -- dwarfs Elbaz's comparatively tame lyrics.

The angry talk and open threats against the march have provoked alarm among gay rights leaders, who recall that last year an ultra-Orthodox man stabbed three people during the gay pride march.

"The incitement to use violence against us is so severe, it's meant to scare people away from the march," said Ayelet Schnur, 32, the vice chairwoman of the Jerusalem Open House, a nonprofit group organizing the march.

Open House leaders have called on the ultra-Orthodox rabbis to instruct their followers that violence against homosexuals is wrong.

But nearly every night for the last week, ultra-Orthodox men have rioted in religious neighborhoods, setting trash on fire and throwing stones at police -- in a show of force they hope will prompt officials to cancel the march.

"We're demonstrating so the cops realize it's too much trouble," said a 22-year-old religious student who gave only his first name, Robert. He was skipping yeshiva class for a violent protest in the ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood of Mea Sharim.

Posters in Orthodox neighborhoods warn the religious to do everything they can to stop the march.

"We call on all the people of Israel to stop this city from becoming Sodom and Gomorrah," reads the poster signed by Orthodox rabbis.

Anti gay slurs are common in Jerusalem in the public debate over the march, in marked contrast to secular Tel Aviv, where the mayor has an adviser on gay and lesbian affairs and gay leaders say their community encounters little hostility.

Jerusalem has become increasingly religious and right-wing over the last decade, and the gay parade is only one of many issues on which the ultra-Orthodox community has asserted itself. One American activist repeatedly used profanity to describe gays during a Knesset hearing, declaring that homosexuals were "no better than pigs or horses."

If the police allow the parade to go ahead, it will mark the fifth year in a row that Jerusalem's gay and lesbian community has marched in a demonstration that is much less colorful and more muted than similar parades in other places, including Tel Aviv.

March organizers at the Jerusalem Open House have deliberately taken a low-key approach, promising that, as in past years, there would be no floats, no music, and no nudity during the march. They offered to cancel the event if religious political parties would agree to support a civil marriage law, an offer refused by the march's opponents.

On Sunday, gay leaders agreed to move the march from the city's modern downtown to a location even farther from the old city and the religious neighborhoods, near the Knesset west of the city center , in a bid to deescalate tensions.

"Somewhere over the rainbow God is watching his holy city," reads a flier distributed by the anti-parade coalition. "Love has limits. Stop the gay parade."

[claude]

Originally Posted by Gentle Giant

claude, you must know that the issue is more complex than what you've articulated.

Yes I do know that, and after I clicked on post I thought that I shouldn't have. I guess the heart of the matter is that a bunch of children's lives were snuffed out because they were on the wrong side of an imaginary line and I find that incredibly frustrating. I don't think I have the energy to learn all of the "complexities" around this bullshit so I guess I should just stay out of it.

[Gentle Giant]

Point is, there are lots of causes and no solutions. And both sides have endured brutal suffering and senseless deaths.


A colleague just peeked her head into my office to tell me that today is the anniversary of Kristallnacht:

Kristallnacht (also known as Reichskristallnacht, Novemberpogrome, Pogromnacht and the Night of Broken Glass) was a pogrom against Jews throughout Germany and parts of Austria on November 9–10, 1938.

Jewish homes and stores were ransacked in a thousand German cities, towns and villages, as ordinary citizens and stormtroopers destroyed buildings with sledgehammers, leaving the streets covered in smashed windows — the origin of the name "Night of Broken Glass." Jews were beaten to death; 30,000 Jewish men were taken to concentration camps; and 1,668 synagogues ransacked or set on fire.

The Times of London commented: "No foreign propangandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenceless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday."

Jews should understand what brute violence by a powerful force feels like.

And yet, with all the things that Jews have invented, why was terrorism not one of them?

[Monte Smith]

Originally Posted by claude

The implication appears to be that the lives of Palestinians are less valuable.

I'm sure that's true. Israel has expressed regret for this incident (something the Palestinians never do), but why wouldn't they regard the defense of their nation against an existential threat as more important than the well-being of Palestinians? Isn't it up to the Palestinian government to regard the lives of their own civilians as more valuable than their interminable, fruitless, self-destructive campaign for the erasure of Israel? Clue phone rings! It's for you, terrorists and your apologists. (I don't mean you, Claude).

[Sandi22]

Talk's cheap.

[Monte Smith]

So are Palestinians until they find something to live for and not against.

[Daniel]

Originally Posted by Monte Smith

I'm sure that's true. Israel has expressed regret for this incident (something the Palestinians never do), but why wouldn't they regard the defense of their nation against an existential threat as more important than the well-being of Palestinians? Isn't it up to the Palestinian government to regard the lives of their own civilians as more valuable than their interminable, fruitless, self-destructive campaign for the erasure of Israel? Clue phone rings! It's for you, terrorists and your apologists. (I don't mean you, Claude).

israel is occupying palestinian territory. everyone knew that the violence would escalate. thing is though, israel wants the palestinian population to leave, so the death of a few arabs is no big deal in the grand scheme of a pure jewish state.

and the current fate of the palestinians certainly isn't in the hands of the palestinian government.

[Daniel]

Originally Posted by Monte Smith

So are Palestinians until they find something to live for and not against.

and this attitude is just repulsive

[GoodSpeak]

What I find equally disturbing is the notion that in a war or military struggle people somehow believe that innocents will be spared.

Guys, once the bullets start flying anybody and everbody in harm's way becomes a target. Bullets and bombs don't distinguish between enemy and civilian.

[Monte Smith]

Originally Posted by Daniel

and the current fate of the palestinians certainly isn't in the hands of the palestinian government.

So to make their lives better, the poor Palestinians will just have to count on the improbable decency of the Israeli population that they shell and suicide bomb and have spent seventy years trying to boot. Good luck with that.

[GoodSpeak]

Originally Posted by Monte Smith

So to make their lives better, the poor Palestinians will just have to count on the improbable decency of the Israeli population that they shell and suicide bomb and have spent seventy years trying to boot. Good luck with that.

Exactly.

Hamas is the proverbial albatross around these kids' necks.


Well said, Monte.

[Daniel]

you guys are failing to recognize that there will be no peace because israel doesn't want peace. again, they want to ethnically cleanse the area.

so you guys can continue to high-five each other whenever palestinians are killed but that's really not going to solve anything (especially when israel repeatedly commits war crimes)

[Monte Smith]

I think Israel would love peace, Daniel.

[Daniel]

the population? of course. as would the palestinian population. however, israel probably wouldn't be able to survive without the west bank and gaza.

[Monte Smith]

Originally Posted by Daniel

the population? of course. as would the palestinian population. however, israel probably wouldn't be able to survive without the west bank and gaza.

They've left Gaza and their position is that the West Bank, minus west Jerusalem and the major settlements like Ariel, will form the bulk of a Palestinian state side by side with Israel. Israel doesn't need the Palestinians. They need peace, which is a thing they have never had since creation.

[Daniel]

they need water and labour

[Monte Smith]

They're fucking Jews. They can buy water and invent labor.

[Scott Dolan]

*high five*

[GoodSpeak]

Originally Posted by Daniel

you guys are failing to recognize that there will be no peace because israel doesn't want peace. again, they want to ethnically cleanse the area.

so you guys can continue to high-five each other whenever palestinians are killed but that's really not going to solve anything (especially when israel repeatedly commits war crimes)

Uh...Daniel?


The stated goal of the Hamas is to destroy Israel.



I could be wrong, but that really doesn't sound much like the Palestinians want peace to me.

[Sandi22]

Everyone wants everything on their own terms. They might say differently, but in the end that's what it boils down to. My way or the highway. It's both sides usual way of thinking.

What I can't comprehend, is our own Jewish people leaving here, leaving the United States to go off to establish settlements, taking over land and homes belonging to Arabs, and the Palestinians; dismantling their homes, bulldozing their olive groves, tearing down the ancient olive presses, destroying and taking these properties, lands which have been owned by Arabs, lands which they've had deeds to for hundreds of years. All because of words in the old Testement and because of Jewish intolarance by large segments of people around the world? Their fears and dreams of a place of safe haven are understandable, however, it's not that two wrongs make a right. The Jews of all peoples know this. They have lived through centuries of abuse and theft of their own properties. They have a deeper understanding of this than any of us could possibly have.

[GoodSpeak]

Two wrongs don't make a right but...


#1 Why do the Palestinians get a free pass when they blow-up civilians in yet another suicide bomber attack?

#2 If you were Jewish and lived in a country where morons like George the II rule the country with his assortment of bully boyz...wouldn't you go someplace where you were wanted?

[Dennis Gonzalez]

"So are Palestinians until they find something to live for and not against."

This kind of rhetoric is written by coddled spoon-fed Americans who have no idea what it's like to be Palestinian or have Palestinian/Lebanese relatives and who by some accident of birth are blessed beyond measure by being born in a place where they can find something to live for.

[GoodSpeak]

Indeed, Dennis.

But, with all due respect, I fail to see where any of this justifies the stated goal [and practice] of the Hamas to destroy Israel.

[Monte Smith]

Originally Posted by Dennis Gonzalez

"So are Palestinians until they find something to live for and not against."

This kind of rhetoric is written by coddled spoon-fed Americans who have no idea what it's like to be Palestinian or have Palestinian/Lebanese relatives and who by some accident of birth are blessed beyond measure by being born in a place where they can find something to live for.

You're probably right, Dennis. But that doesn't answer the Palestinian problem. The unspoon-fed Palestinians can't get rid of Israel but they might be able to get rid of their cousins who think that getting rid of Israel is the eschatological answer to local problems.

Isn't that the problem?

[GoodSpeak]

Nope.

Hamas is the problem.

[Sandi22]

Originally Posted by GoodSpeak

Two wrongs don't make a right but...


#1 Why do the Palestinians get a free pass when they bomb civilians in yet another suicide bomber attack?

#2 If you were Jewish and lived in a country where morons like George the II rule the country with his assortment of bully boyz...wouldn't you go someplace where you were wanted?

I don't see them as getting a free pass. Not at all. I think of them as desparate, ill informed zealots who will never accomplish a thing doing this regardless of how much clout the Jewish terrorist/zionist/freedom fighters gained when they bombed the King David Hotel, from when the Jews themselves had their finger in the terrorist pie.

We're in different times, and there are much better methods out there for Palestinians and Israeli's/Jews alike to use to gain some power, to gain the respect of one another, to gain respect from the world around them for that matter.. Power without respect amounts to very little in my opinion and who can respect a country or a cause which blows up innocents? Killing at will regardless of which side of the issue they're on. You say rightious and I say rightious, each from our own side of the issues involved.

Palestinians blowing themselves and the Jews up won't and hasn't accomplished a thing. The Israeli's keeping the Palestinians down, keeping them in menial working slots, keeping them bottled up in the heat and the cold at checkpoints for hours on end is something they really do resent, and who wouldn't feel the same? Protection is needed, but this is a bother for those not into violence, for those so tired from a hard days work. I know how I would feel if I had to endure such as this year after year.

This situation in Israel and in the Palestinian camps; their ghetto, keeps the money flowing into each camp, allowing both of them to keep up the carnage. With peace, where will the money come from?

[GoodSpeak]

Fair enough.

But my contention is that the Hamas simply does not know right from wrong anymore.

They only know hate and the killing of Jews and suicide bombers to 70 virgins.


They are over focused on themselves. And if the Israelis make a mistake in bombing a civilian target instead of the intended target they conveniently forget that THAT is where they place their defenses: in and among civilians. Is it any surprise to any of us that children may be killed because of the Hamas' morally corrupt need to hide like a coward among them? Really???


It gives them a convenient excuse for those in America who only see children killed rather than the real picture of how the bloody Hamas bastards hide behind their own innocent children.


The Hamas is as evil as the Devil himself, Sandi.



Jesus save me....am I the only one here who sees this?!?

[Sandi22]

No we see evil aplenty, but it is a two way street.

If both sides wanted peace there would be peace. We've heard where there's too much to gain by being violent. There's the public support from private individuals around the world, their donations are in the millions, and then there's massive state sponsored funding from us and others around the world going to both sides. If peace were to happen a big part of these funds would dry up.