Israel vs Hezbollah Thread #3

[feederband]

They killed some Arabic children early on in the fighting...The head of Hezbollah said it was unfortunate but they had died martyrs...

[rainstorm]

oops, looks like rueters has another problem

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7...256534,00.html

[alicia-w]

and Hezbollah has said that they will coninue fighting as long as Israel is on Lebanese soil... so basically the UN is wasting their time

bully for them since THEY started this by killing and abducting Israelis on ISRAELI soil. I'm so sick and tired of hearing the how the world is shocked by the deaths in Lebanon. Where were these folks when Israelis were murdered in restaurants, buses, clubs, etc? Where were these people when an Israeli doctor was murdered and his body burned?

Hezbollah has elected representatives in the Lebanese govt. If the govt wants it to stop, their military should be working with Israel to get rid of Hezbollah. I'm tired of watching friends and family die at the hands of terrorists who are funded by countries wanting all Israelis dead.

[Brent]

and Hezbollah has said that they will coninue fighting as long as Israel is on Lebanese soil... so basically the UN is wasting their time

bully for them since THEY started this by killing and abducting Israelis on ISRAELI soil. I'm so sick and tired of hearing the how the world is shocked by the deaths in Lebanon. Where were these folks when Israelis were murdered in restaurants, buses, clubs, etc? Where were these people when an Israeli doctor was murdered and his body burned?

Hezbollah has elected representatives in the Lebanese govt. If the govt wants it to stop, their military should be working with Israel to get rid of Hezbollah. I'm tired of watching friends and family die at the hands of terrorists who are funded by countries wanting all Israelis dead.

I completely agree.

[Audrey2Katrina]

I agree as well.. Hezbollah always was, and will forever be a gang of terrorist THUGS, and it is sad that Reuters, hasn't got the wherewithal for some time to use the word "terrorists" in calling these kinds of people what they actually are. This world better wake up to this growing malignancy in their midst--or it will pay a much higher price further down the road.

A2K

[Audrey2Katrina]

FANTASTIC article about how the "West" may be lost! I find it an exceptionally well written article on the feckless individuals who are incapable of distinguishing between self-defense, and the outright seeking out of civilians to murder while hiding behind others:

http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson080406.html

Just an intro here:

"When I used to read about the 1930s — the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the rise of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Germany, the appeasement in France and Britain, the murderous duplicity of the Soviet Union, and the racist Japanese murdering in China — I never could quite figure out why, during those bleak years, Western Europeans and those in the United States did not speak out and condemn the growing madness, if only to defend the millennia-long promise of Western liberalism.

Not any longer.

Our present generation too is on the brink of moral insanity. That has never been more evident than in the last three weeks, as the West has proven utterly unable to distinguish between an attacked democracy that seeks to strike back at terrorist combatants, and terrorist aggressors who seek to kill civilians."

---end of exerpt....

It's a fairly good sized article--but IMO, it says it all--EXTREMELY well!

A2K

[Cookiely]

For those who don't know, Dennis Miller is a comedian who has a show called
Dennis Miller Live on HBO.
He is a Christian.

He recently said the following about the Midest situation:

"A brief overview of the situation is always valuable, so as a service to
all Americans who still don't get it, I now offer you the story of the
Middle East in just a few paragraphs, which is all you really need.

Here we go:

The Palestinians want their own country.
There's just one thing about that: There are no Palestinians.
It's a made up word.
Israel was called Palestine for two thousand years.
Like "Wiccan," "Palestinian" sounds ancient but is really a modern invention

Before the Israelis won the land in the 1967 war, Gaza was owned by Egypt,
the West Bank was owned by Jordan, and there were no "Palestinians."

As soon as the Jews took over and started growing oranges as big as
basketballs, what do you know, say hello to the "Palestinians,"
weeping for their deep bond with their lost "land" and "nation."

So for the sake of honesty, let's not use the word "Palestinian"
anymore to describe these delightful folks, who dance for joy at our deaths,
until someone points out they're being taped.

Instead, let's call them what they are

"Other Arabs Who Can't Accomplish Anything In Life And Would Rather Wrap
Themselves In The Seductive Melodrama Of Eternal Struggle And Death."

I know that's a bit unwieldy to expect to see on CNN.
How about this, then: "Adjacent Jew-Haters."
Okay, so the Adjacent Jew-Haters want their own country.
Oops, just one more thing. No, they don't.
They could've had their own country any time in the last thirty years,
especially two years ago at Camp David but if you have your own country, you
have to have traffic lights and garbage trucks and Chambers of Commerce,
and, worse, you actually have to figure out some way to make a living.

That's no fun. No, they want what all the other Jew-Haters in the region
want: Israel.
They also want a big pile of dead Jews, of course -- that's where the real
fun is -- but mostly they want Israel.

Why? For one thing, trying to destroy Israel - or "The Zionist Entity"
as their textbooks call it --
for the last fifty years has allowed the rulers of Arab countries to divert
the attention of their own people away from the fact that they're the
blue-ribbon most illiterate, poorest, and tribally backward on God's Earth,
and if you've ever been around God's Earth . . . you know that's really
saying something.

It makes me roll my eyes every time one of our pundits waxes poetic about
the great history and culture of the Muslim Midleast.
Unless I'm missing something, the Arabs haven't given anything to the world
since Algebra, and, by the way, thanks a hell of a lot for that one.

Chew this around & spit it out: 500 million Arabs; 5 million Jews.
Think of all the Arab countries as a football field, and Israel as a pack of
matches sitting in the middle of it.
And now these same folks swear that, if Israel gives them half of that pack
of matches, everyone will be pals..

Really? Wow, what neat news. Hey, but what about the string of wars to
obliterate the tiny country and the constant din of rabid blood oaths to
drive every Jew into the sea?
Oh, that? We were just kidding.

My friend Kevin Rooney made a gorgeous point the other day:
Just reverse the Numbers.
Imagine 500 million Jews and 5 million Arabs.
I was stunned at the simple brilliance of it .
Can anyone picture the Jews strapping belts of razor blades and dynamite to
themselves? Of course not.

Or marshaling every fiber and force at their disposal for generations to
drive a tiny Arab State into the sea? Nonsense.
Or dancing for joy at the murder of innocents? Impossible.
Or spreading and believing horrible lies about the Arabs baking their bread
with the blood of children? Disgusting.

No, as you know, left to themselves in a world of peace, the worst Jews
would ever do to people is debate them to death.

Mr. Bush, God bless him, is walking a tightrope. I understand that, with
vital operations in Iraq and others, it's in our interest, as Americans, to
try to stabilize our Arab allies as much as possible, and, after all, that
can't be much harder than stabilizing a roomful of super models who've just
had their drugs taken away.

However, in any big-picture strategy, there's always a danger of losing
moral weight. We've already lost some.
After September 11th, our president told us and the world he was going to
root out all terrorists and the countries that supported them.
Beautiful.
Then the Israelis, after months and months of having the equivalent of an
Oklahoma City every week (and then every day), start to do the same thing we
did, and we tell them to show restraint.

If America were being attacked with an Oklahoma City every day, we would all
very shortly be screaming for the administration to just be done with it and
kill everything south of the Mediterranean and east of the Jordan.
SOMEONE RECENTLY SENT THIS TO ME. I THINK THEY THOUGHT HE HAD WRITTEN IT RECENTLY. IT WAS WRITTEN IN 2003. IT JUST SEEMS LIKE A BAD RECURRING DREAM OVER AND OVER. WILL IT EVER TRULY BE RESOLVED OR WILL THIS BE APPROPRIATE TO SEND AS NEW EMAIL IN FIVE YEARS?

[Regit]

Just in the interest of fair citation, the above was written by Larry Miller in the Daily Standard on April 22, 2002.

[x-y-no]

Reality is rather more complex that Mr. Miller imagines.

Does he really believe that the region called Palestine, which included what are now Israel and Jordan, stood empty for the millenium before the advent of the Zionist movement?

Sure, a lot of those self-identifying as "Palestinians" were contemporaneous immigrants to the Jewish immigrants of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but others were not. There certainly was an indiginous population ekeing out a living tending olive trees, herding goats, etc. And there certainly have been Arab populations in the towns and cities of the region continuously for well over a thousand years.

Regardless of the fact that the region has a history of being ruled from afar, I don't see why it's illegitimate for those people to feel a bond with the land and to choose to identify themselves as "Palestinian."

[Audrey2Katrina]

Nothing wrong with "bonding" with the land at all; but why wait until several DECADES after another state is established to call yourself by a name that had beforehand never been used?

I've managed to find a few more interesting "facts" about this Mideast dillema:

*Disclaimer: The following are taken from a good friend of mine who has served in the US Military, and a source I trust; no claim is made to the complete and unquestioning validity of every assertion; that said, as already stated, I trust the source, and in looking into several of its claims have found them to be pretty much on target. The material appears to focus on the claims of who had the most valid claim to Jerusalem--as can be noted in the several references to how each culture reveres what is claimed as territory belonging to both cultures.

ISRAEL AND JERUSALEM FACTS

1. ISRAEL BECAME A STATE IN 1312 B.C., TWO MILLENNIA BEFORE ISLAM.

2. ARAB REFUGEES FROM ISRAEL BEGAN CALLING THEMSELVES "PALESTINIANS" IN
1967, TWO DECADES AFTER (MODERN) ISRAELI STATEHOOD.

3. AFTER CONQUERING THE LAND IN 1272 B.C., JEWS RULED IT FOR A THOUSAND
YEARS AND MAINTAINED A CONTINUOUS PRESENCE THERE FOR 3,300 YEARS.

4. THE ONLY ARAB RULE FOLLOWING CONQUEST IN 633 B.C. LASTED JUST 22 YEARS.

5. FOR OVER 3,300 YEARS, JERUSALEM WAS THE JEWISH CAPITAL. IT WAS NEVER THE
CAPITAL OF ANY ARAB OR MUSLIM ENTITY. EVEN UNDER JORDANIAN RULE, EAST
JERUSALEM WAS NOT MADE THE CAPITAL, AND NO ARAB LEADER CAME TO VISIT IT.

6. JERUSALEM IS MENTIONED OVER 700 TIMES IN THE BIBLE, BUT NOT ONCE IS IT
MENTIONED IN THE QUR'AN.

7. KING DAVID FOUNDED JERUSALEM; MOHAMMED NEVER SET FOOT IN IT.

8. JEWS PRAY FACING JERUSALEM; MUSLIMS FACE MECCA. IF THEY ARE BETWEEN THE
TWO CITIES, MUSLIMS PRAY FACING MECCA, WITH THEIR BACKS TO JERUSALEM.

9. IN 1948, ARAB LEADERS URGED THEIR PEOPLE TO LEAVE, PROMISING TO CLEANSE
THE LAND OF JEWISH PRESENCE. 68% OF THEM FLED WITHOUT EVER SETTING EYES ON AN
ISRAELI SOLDIER.

10. VIRTUALLY THE ENTIRE JEWISH POPULATION OF MUSLIM COUNTRIES HAD TO FLEE
AS THE RESULT OF VIOLENCE AND POGROMS.

11. SOME 630,000 ARABS LEFT ISRAEL IN 1948, WHILE CLOSE TO A MILLION JEWS
WERE FORCED TO LEAVE THE MUSLIM COUNTRIES.

12. IN SPITE OF THE VAST TERRITORIES AT THEIR DISPOSAL, ARAB REFUGEES WERE
DELIBERATELY PREVENTED FROM ASSIMILATING INTO THEIR HOST COUNTRIES. OF 100
MILLION REFUGEES FOLLOWING WORLD WAR 2, THEY ARE THE ONLY GROUP TO HAVE NEVER
INTEGRATED WITH THEIR CORELIGIONISTS. MOST OF THE JEWISH REFUGEES FROM EUROPE AND ARAB LANDS WERE SETTLED IN ISRAEL, A COUNTRY NO LARGER THAN NEW JERSEY.

13. THERE ARE 22 MUSLIM COUNTRIES, NOT COUNTING PALESTINE. THERE IS ONLY ONE
JEWISH STATE. ARABS STARTED ALL FIVE WARS AGAINST ISRAEL, AND LOST EVERY ONE
OF THEM.

14. FATAH AND HAMAS CONSTITUTIONS STILL CALL FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF ISRAEL.
ISRAEL CEDED MOST OF THE WEST BANK AND ALL OF GAZA TO THE PALESTINIAN
AUTHORITY, AND EVEN PROVIDED IT WITH ARMS.

15. DURING THE JORDANIAN OCCUPATION, JEWISH HOLY SITES WERE VANDALIZED AND
WERE OFF LIMITS TO JEWS. UNDER ISRAELI RULE, ALL MUSLIM AND CHRISTIAN HOLY
SITES ARE ACCESSIBLE TO ALL FAITHS.

16. OUT OF 175 UNITED NATIONS SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTIONS UP TO 1990, 97
WERE AGAINST ISRAEL; OUT OF 690 GENERAL ASSEMBLY RESOLUTIONS, 429 WERE AGAINST ISRAEL.

17. THE U.N. WAS SILENT WHEN THE JORDANIANS DESTROYED 58 SYNAGOGUES IN THE
OLD CITY OF JERUSALEM. IT REMAINED SILENT WHILE JORDAN SYSTEMATICALLY
DESECRATED THE ANCIENT JEWISH & GUT THE CEMETERY ON THE MOUNT OF OLIVES, AND IT REMAINED SILENT WHEN JORDAN ENFORCED APARTHEID LAWS PREVENTING JEWS FROM
ACCESSING THE TEMPLE MOUNT AND WESTERN WALL.

THESE ARE TRYING TIMES. WE MUST ASK OURSELVES WHAT WE SHOULD BE DOING, AND
WHAT WE WILL TELL OUR GRANDCHILDREN ABOUT OUR ACTIONS DURING THIS CRISIS, WHEN WE HAD THE CHANCE TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

What I find difficult to understand is how, when there yet remains an Arab population, living in complete peace (except for the occasional Hezbollah or Hamas, or some other terrorist bomb going off); the roamining so-called "homeless" Palestinians have yet to simply assimilate--either in their neighboring countries, in which there certainly is no lack of land--or by putting down their arms and simply living were they do peacably. The Israelis have returned just about every mile of land they'd conquered since the multiple wars with their neighbors have been fought and STILL their neighbors cry for more--there is something seriously wrong with a picture that condemns a state with something less than 7 million people, and the size of the state of New Jersey, while proving verbally impotent or tacit in roundly condemning the hideous actions of a group of nations, the combined size of which would rival that of Russia, and the population of which that of India.

Something is wrong with this picture.

A2K

[x-y-no]

As I said, the reality of the situation is complex. There are some valid points in that list, and some which are debatable.

But the point of my reply above was that the cause of a long-term solution is ill served by promulgating the fiction that there is no such thing as an indigenous Arab population of the region who have suffered as a result of all these events. My objection specifically was to the claim that "[t]here are no Palestinians." Quibbles as to when the term came into use aside, there is a real group to whom the term legitimately applies. Granted, (as with some Native American tribes) there are others who claim the label with less legitimacy. But that doesn't change the reality of a displaced indigenous Arab population.

[Audrey2Katrina]

But that doesn't change the reality of a displaced indigenous Arab population.

Actually I have no disagreement with you on this point. My bone of contention is that there was also a HUGE displacement of Jews when hostilities between the two cultures mushroomed after the establishment of the state of Israel. I simply do not understand this tiny country's ability to take in, and assimilate it's people, while numbers of others not only couldn't... but simply would't assimilate into an astronomically larger area into which they might adequately have fit. I know the numbers don't fit even remotely; but I just can't envision the million referenced "displaced" Jews from Muslim countries, going into terrorist tirades about how they've been "forced" from their homeland. Yes there has been suffering--on BOTH sides. It's HOW the two have dealt with that suffering that I find most noteworthy.

A2K

[x-y-no]

But that doesn't change the reality of a displaced indigenous Arab population.

Actually I have no disagreement with you on this point. My bone of contention is that there was also a HUGE displacement of Jews when hostilities between the two cultures mushroomed after the establishment of the state of Israel. I simply do not understand this tiny country's ability to take in, and assimilate it's people, while numbers of others not only couldn't... but simply would't assimilate into an astronomically larger area into which they might adequately have fit. I know the numbers don't fit even remotely; but I just can't envision the million referenced "displaced" Jews from Muslim countries, going into terrorist tirades about how they've been "forced" from their homeland. Yes there has been suffering--on BOTH sides. It's HOW the two have dealt with that suffering that I find most noteworthy.

A2K

And actually I don't have any disagreement with any of that. I've long argued that the Palestinian people have been very ill served by their alleged friends in neighboring Arab states and even worse served by their own leaders. The iconic example of that in my mind was the 2000 Camp David summit where Barak went further than I ever expected it possible for Israel to go yet Arafat walked away. The reason was clear, I think - the various Palestinian leadership groups have all carried such a hard line for so long that it's politically infeasable for them to relinquish it. Thus Arafat felt compelled to give up the best offer they'll ever see.

[rainstorm]

is reuters pure slime? they now admit faking more anti-israeli propaganda:



http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340 ... 74,00.html

why is it that all the stories and photos they fake are done to rip israel? reuters should be shut down

[rainstorm]

i think we can safely say reuters is not a "news" organization, they are a terror propaganda group. this happens too often to be innocent mistakes

[Derek Ortt]

is a cause for grave concern when you have al reuters repeatedly doing this

[x-y-no]

is reuters pure slime? they now admit faking more anti-israeli propaganda:



http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340 ... 74,00.html

why is it that all the stories and photos they fake are done to rip israel? reuters should be shut down

So according to this story, a freelance photographer based in Beirut used photoshop to alter some of his photos, and when this was discoverd by others and pointed out to Reuters, they fired the photographer, withdrew all his work and launched an investigation, and released an announcement of what had happened.

And this makes them "pure slime"?

Have you never in your life encountered a situation where an employee turned out to be dishonest? Did that automatically make his employer "pure slime"?

[Audrey2Katrina]

I don't disagree with what you suggest in the opening of your comment, Jan; but bear in mind that Reuters has now an established history of being less than candid in calling a spade a spade. Unless they've backtracked, they refuse to even use the word "terrorist" in referring to--well terrorists! This is hardly what I'd call a good news source as they can't recognize terror for what it is. It is also not just an isolated case--this is the second time in as many weeks that Reuter's has rushed to press with phony pictures. They were also very quick to jump the gun on the death reports at Qana, (granted everyone else that I know of did as wel). On the whole, I've quite frequently read articles by Reuters--actually I still do if it's on a topic of interest--but I read it now with a very "gleaning" eye, as they've lost a lot of credibility with me.

A2K

[nystate]

i think we can safely say reuters is not a "news" organization, they are a terror propaganda group. this happens too often to be innocent mistakes

Hate to break it to you, but even Fox News trusts Reuters as a reputable source. One guy does not turn one of the most respected news organizations in the world into slime...

[rainstorm]

again, why is it al reuters never seems to fake photo's to make terror look bad.

also, if our govt faked photos to hurt terror , the media would demand investigations. al reuters should be investigated. where is the media on these despicable actions?