Again, my posts show my views so how you see that as Euro-centric is beyond me.

In that part of the world a woman is property, like cattle or camels. Don't assume the European view that a woman is a human being with rights like a man. If you don't understand how they view the world, you will never understand how they make the decisions they do.

I have no need to take a European view. I've lived in the midst of Muslim communities for close to 30 years & fully aware of how they see & treat women.

So a cinder block wall is property and somehow I don't think you would be talking cowardice about a soldier standing behind it .... You are taking a European view, even if you won't admit it. More themism. More value judgements. More "My morals are better then your morals." More "My religion is the true religion."

The correct question is, does the military tactic work? Even if the enemy doesn't hesitate to shoot, if you can play on supporters morals to send resources .... Turn your enemy's morals into a weapon against them!

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But as it has been noted by others, there is a "them and us" situation here. And from several directions, not just the Israeli, the Hamas led Gaza Strip are regarded as "them" and they are collectively regarded as being one group.

Plus unlike you, I have been in area's of the World were there are differences of opinion and no matter whether it is right or wrong if there is trouble from one area they are invariable regarded as "them". And in nearly all situations you will find that those "others" are at least sympathetic to the cause.

Sadly the us vs them has never helped solve a conflict. All it does is focus attention on the few differences between two groups of people, while ignoring the fact that they have a lot of things in common. Of course, if you look at people that you regard as the 'other', you will find that they perfectly fit your stereotypical view of that other. But that is more because you are projecting that image on them and selectively ignoring and highlighting traits that fit your stereotype than what these people actually represent.

The main point I was trying to point out is that not all Arab Islamic people are opposed to Israel, whereas most, as far as I can tell, in Gaza are.

Well, some remarks on that. As Clyde already pointed out, Hamas has no qualms with murdering people that publicly oppose Hamas and the Hamas party line. So yeah, who really knows what people think. On top of that, one can perfectly be against Israel and everything it represents, but that doesn't mean you immediately approve of murdering everyone who lives in Israel. And can you really blame them for their dislike or even hatred against Israel? They live in an area that was occupied by Israel less than a decade ago, and that has since been in a blockade which has caused shortages of nearly everything. They are attacked by Jewish settlers, driven from their homes and land, and every time some idiots fire a rocket from the next street you can expect an artillery shell to land near you. Are you really surprised that many Palestinians don't think highly of Israel?

So a cinder block wall is property and somehow I don't think you would be talking cowardice about a soldier standing behind it .... You are taking a European view, even if you won't admit it. More themism. More value judgements. More "My morals are better then your morals." More "My religion is the true religion."

The correct question is, does the military tactic work? Even if the enemy doesn't hesitate to shoot, if you can play on supporters morals to send resources .... Turn your enemy's morals into a weapon against them!

This crap about proportionate responses is also crap! Conflict breaks out & it's best stopped ASAP. If not, then one side or the other has to be the victor/vanquished otherwise as seen to date it just potters along, as this morning's break of the truce shows...

+1

This as well as similar posts seem to show that we agree so...

...is your view the European view or is it that mine is an American view?

Personally, I don't give a damn what view it is...Whoever starts a conflict had better be prepared for the consequences. Until man gets away from resolving issues with the barrel of a gun, the innocent will always suffer.

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The General Secretary of United Nations (UN) Ban Ki-Moon collaborated in secret with Israel and the United States to weaken the effects of a Board of Inquiry's report accusing Israel of human rights violations in Gaza in Dec. 2008 – Jan. 2009.

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Reality Internet Personality

The Best

and

The Worst

of humanity.

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Tariq Ali, writer and journalist, speaking at the mass rally for Gaza in Hyde Park, London today.

"There is a basic point that has to be made to our politicians. They have to understand that there is no equivalence betweeen the Palestinian resistance and the Israeli occupation. When a country is occupied, resistance emerges. If you want no rockets being fired, no tunnels being dug, get out of Gaza."

Succinct.

297902 said:

diplomatic solution

Yeah, Hear Dat A Lot. When Are You Brainiacs going to Make 'it' Work?

Until Then, DEAD Like Me is de rigueur.

Grass Is High. Time To Mow.

Ooopsie, It's Raining Missiles and Bombs Again.

Next Week Maybe.

' '

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May we All have a METAMORPHOSIS. REASON. GOoD JUDGEMENT and LOVE and ORDER!!!!!

Okey dokey - have decided the best way to do catch-up for older posts I unfortunately missed is to combine several from one setizen at a time :) (This could take some time folks... :))

Firstly, Bob :) May I say... you are NOT a lone voice in the wilderness :) even though it can often seem like that on these boards... :) *friendly anniet glare all round* can't it people? :)

Your posts make a lot of sense and contain some pointed and very sad truths which I suspect aren't comfortable for some of our more heated setizens to answer or dispute. For example:

The people who would willingly live together in harmony aren't given a chance to prove it. Somebody is making too big of a profit off of the violence to give peace a chance.

I doubt that there is a solution that would work with the current governments in place, both in the region and elsewhere. Somebody has to be making a profit off of the misery or it would stop.

... amongst others. The following however, is perhaps the saddest of all... because we are after all, talking about people...

I have seen it stated several times in this thread that the issue won't be settled until one side or the other is completely eliminated or more precisely exterminated.

:( Okay... so it has been put across in a “dispassionately objective” or “academic” manner (if you like) by some here... a clinical excision that neglects the very messy consequences that would come from a listening and watching world... who do not like what they see unfolding. (Those who exterminated the Hottentots for example - did not have that to consider.) When we in the west comfort ourselves with the “silence” of official government lines (on Gaza and Palestine) wherever we look, we are making a very big mistake :( and the rise in anti-semitic attacks :( that Sirius recently posted a link to, is likely to be just the beginning :(

And then there are those who have posted with a very subjective view on the extermination of one side in particular :( which is really no better than the rhetoric of Hamas's leadership or the view of the far right Israeli either :(

I am guilty of not always acknowledging posts I agree with, for which I apologise, and there are I'm sure many others out there who may do the same... particularly in a polarising thread like this one... which races along at breakneck speed and leaves us chasing after a tail we have taken exception to in order to try to sink our teeth into it :) whilst sometimes forgetting (as we snarl past :)) to acknowledge those we concurringly wag in unison with :)

... amongst others. The following however, is perhaps the saddest of all... because we are after all, talking about people...

I have seen it stated several times in this thread that the issue won't be settled until one side or the other is completely eliminated or more precisely exterminated.

We have unfortunately seen a demonstration here on the boards of belief and how thoroughly it is possible to delude or insulate your mind from logical thought processes. Our example here has been ID. How no matter what truth was spoken or how the argument for formed, belief trumped logic. This is why all religion is extremely dangerous, possibly the single most dangerous idea of man.

When you have a holy book that is written by "god" that orders you to kill all who do not believe the same as you and you believe that book, what choice do others have in dealing with the believers? If there are but a handful, like Branch Davidians, we saw how well that turned out. Now if there are millions of them how could you expect a different ending?

I suspect many think there must be some magic words that will suddenly make them come to their senses. They don't exist. Not for believers. Even the Cop thread talks about these delusions and how powerful they can be. Anti-psychotic medication and ECT can't be applied to millions, can they?

Frankly until the world consigns all the Abrahamic religions, which are founded upon evil hatred of others, to the dust bin of history, we will continue to have slaughter on this planet. I do think more slaughter has been done in the name of the Abrahamic religions than all others causes combined. That alone should be enough evidence to prove they are maximally evil.

He believes different than I do:
1) That is wrong and evil, it must be stopped.
2) That is wonderful and exciting, I must learn more.


At some point we have to stop deluding ourselves that there is some magic solution to this strife. The only solution is to throw away the holy books and their immorality and adopt ethics. It won't be perfect, nothing is, but it will be several orders of magnitude better than the hate filled claptrap in those holy books. Unfortunately as ID has shown us education has a very high failure rate and can take decades if it will work at all. That leaves very few options, especially when there is a time factor involved.

So what is the solution? Allow free trade in Gaza so they can build better bombs and wipe out Israel? Let Israel wipe out Gaza and then the rest of the world wipe out Israel for war crimes? Build a wall around both and force them at each others throats? Proposals to kick the can down the road aren't fixes and undoubtedly will result in even more death and destruction than if they hadn't been adopted.

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Hi Martin :) I was intrigued by your post on Palestinian birthrates. As no one appears to have attempted to balance that rather wonky equation, I thought I would have a go :) I refer specifically to this bit (to which Gary responded)...

... "There have been statements from Hamas urging women to have more children to create a larger army," he says.

teach your children to teach their children to kill and hate ....

That last, applies to both sides (pointed out by others in this thread – (which I WILL get to... eventually :)) but I'm wondering whether you're aware of the following? Take a peek... Israeli women have the highest fertility rate in developed world.... yet, despite this, per capita, Israel also has the highest number of fertility clinics in the world, and one in four children in Israel are the result of IVF treatment. The spread of Jewish Orthodoxy is also creating more families with large numbers of children (although - weirdly - Israel's government seems to be getting a bit paranoid about them... I wonder if it's because Orthodox Jews tend to be anti-Zionist and therefore the "wrong kind" of Jew for the Israeli state? But let's not get too bogged down with that :))

From wiki:

Preserving a Jewish majority population within the state of Israel is a defining principle among Israeli Jews, where Jewish couples are encouraged to have large families. For instance, Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion set up a monetary fund for Jewish women who gave birth to at least 10 children.
A study in 2010 showed that Jewish birthrates rose by 31% and 19,000 diaspora Jews immigrated to Israel, while the Arab birthrate fell by 1.7%. By June 2013, a number of Israeli demographers called the so-called Arab demographic time bomb a myth, citing a declining Arab and Muslim birth rate, an incremental increase in the Israeli Jewish birth rate, unnecessary demographic scare campaigns, as well as inflated statistics released by the Palestinian Authority

Equation a little less unbalanced? I do hope so :) So what about this next post?

So where are all the Gazan youths going?

I wonder what proportion are fighting the wars in Lebanon, Syria, and now Iraq for the glory of Hamas?

Or is there some other exodus?

Perhaps the answer lies partly in the periodic “cull” (or to use Israel's term “cutting the grass in Gaza") of those who once trusted and believed their parents held the answer to all problems (like so many of us do when we're little) only to grow up and realise that waiting for things to change for the better and growing old or dying or grieving for loved ones whilst being penned like animals is not much of a life. It really isn't hard to see why they might decide instead to fight with those who promised them so much more than that :( (incidentally - in case you're thinking of the Syriac 72 sweet white raisins thing here :) it isn't exactly new - Richard Dawkins referred to it in a book of his about ten years ago and he was quoting from a much earlier study than that :) the promise I'm actually referring to is the fanciful rhetoric about destroying their oppressors :( Certainly this next quote from a post of yours suggests "tending the lawn" might be a contributing factor to the "missing" Gaza youths...

Caution needed with Gaza casualty figures

... "It's important to bear in mind that in Operation Cast Lead [the last Israeli ground offensive in December 2008-January 2009], Hamas and Gaza-based organisations claimed that only 50 combatants were killed, admitting years later the number was between 600-700...

At last some good investigative journalism offering some small truth.

I will take your word on the latter for the moment :) whilst bearing in mind that the BBC has recently been accused of being less than objective in it's news reporting of this conflict. Perhaps they should have included the number of Israeli soldiers that have been killed by friendly fire too – just for a bit of balance (they appear to be averaging around ten percent of their casualties) and cleared up that dog's dinner of reporting over the “kidnapped soldier” fiasco (who may himself have been tragically bombed to smithereens by his own side)

How to get out of that?

Erm... Get out of what precisely? Gaza? If I was feeling mischievous I'd suggest digging a tunnel...

After the decades of the same or similar story, what practical options does Israel have other than to diminish the Gaza Strip until there is nothing left or allow their own self destruction

I think this board is littered with “practical options” (after decades of the same story) given by a number of posters here, that are about delivering some justice to a seriously repressed group of people incarcerated in what may in fact be less of a Bantustan than a concentration camp :( So perhaps, if you wouldn't mind :) could you define your meaning of the word “diminish” for me... you know... in the context of your concluding sentence? Is it anything like Ayelet Shaked's for example? :/

Does it involve ever more flattening of buildings perhaps? Like the university (whose students were predominantly female) which had only just been rebuilt, or the homes of families who had already lost homes elsewhere under Israeli landgrabs and purges? And what about the carbon footprint price attached to, ooh - let's say for example, the cement that keeps getting pulverized/"diminished" under Israeli bombs? Wrong thread I know :) but I can't help wondering... :) does that concern you at all...?

Oh dear... that WAS a long muse... I do hope, for everyone's sake, my next retro-post is a lot shorter :) it seems a little unfair that poor Мишель gets accused of verbiage for posting what is probably just a fraction of my own tonnage don't you think? :)

Now... I wonder who I should have a chat with next... :)

When the UN 'Takes On' the Jihadists who wish to exterminate The Jewish People, as they 'Take On' Israel.

When the UN 'Takes On' the Mass Murdering/Beheading, Homophobic, Anti-Women, Anti-Christian/Buddhist/Hindu/etc. Jihadists, and their supporters in The West:

Then the UN will have recovered its Moral Authority to do anything.

Oh please. Don't you follow the news? The UN is CONSTANTLY accusing Jihadists groups from war crimes and all kinds of other terrible things. Seriously, pay some attention and stop pretending like everyone gives Hamas a free pass here.

I agree with the point of 'Seriously Oppressed People'.

These are the innocent followers Islam. The VAST majority.

They are being governed, oppressed, occupied, and overrun by Mass Murdering/Beheading, exterminate anyone who doesn't believe in their evil: Jihadists.

It is entirely understandable there are those in The West, who believe one can negotiate with this movement. It is within The West's Culture/Thinking. But why negotiate with this Evil Movement, whose ONLY wish is to Exterminate those who aren't THEM. This includes ALL Non-Jihadist's in The West.

Since, I believe, no thinking, ethical, moral person would negotiate THEIR OWN Extermination:

What now?

I fully agree with you.
The Isreals should not build houses on palestinian ground.

I agree with the point of 'Seriously Oppressed People'.

These are the innocent followers Islam. The VAST majority.

They are being governed, oppressed, occupied, and overrun by Mass Murdering/Beheading, exterminate anyone who doesn't believe in their evil: Jihadists.

It is entirely understandable there are those in The West, who believe one can negotiate with this movement. It is within The West's Culture/Thinking. But why negotiate with this Evil Movement, whose ONLY wish is to Exterminate those who aren't THEM. This includes ALL Non-Jihadist's in The West.

Since, I believe, no thinking, ethical, moral person would negotiate THEIR OWN Extermination:

What now?

I fully agree with you.
The Isreals should not build houses on palestinian ground.

And Arabs should not build houses on Israeli land ...

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There is a hypothesis that the reason SETI has not been sucessful is that when a civilization reaches a certain point it self distructs. I ask if that is what is happening in the mideast?

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I agree with the point of 'Seriously Oppressed People'.

These are the innocent followers Islam. The VAST majority.

They are being governed, oppressed, occupied, and overrun by Mass Murdering/Beheading, exterminate anyone who doesn't believe in their evil: Jihadists.

It is entirely understandable there are those in The West, who believe one can negotiate with this movement. It is within The West's Culture/Thinking. But why negotiate with this Evil Movement, whose ONLY wish is to Exterminate those who aren't THEM. This includes ALL Non-Jihadist's in The West.

Since, I believe, no thinking, ethical, moral person would negotiate THEIR OWN Extermination:

What now?

I fully agree with you.
The Isreals should not build houses on palestinian ground.

Israel on your border. Jihadist's on your border.

You have chosen The Mass Murdering/Beheading, Homophobic, Anti-Women, Anti-Christian/Buddhist/Hindu/etc., Jihadists.

Hope YOUR women understand.

You have to ask here about that.
I won't pass that question for you.

If one side can live on the other sides ground.
Why not try the opposite.
Let Palestinians live and work in Israel.

Then both sides can share the bennefits of mixing.

I agree with the point of 'Seriously Oppressed People'.

These are the innocent followers Islam. The VAST majority.

They are being governed, oppressed, occupied, and overrun by Mass Murdering/Beheading, exterminate anyone who doesn't believe in their evil: Jihadists.

It is entirely understandable there are those in The West, who believe one can negotiate with this movement. It is within The West's Culture/Thinking. But why negotiate with this Evil Movement, whose ONLY wish is to Exterminate those who aren't THEM. This includes ALL Non-Jihadist's in The West.

Since, I believe, no thinking, ethical, moral person would negotiate THEIR OWN Extermination:

What now?

I fully agree with you.
The Isreals should not build houses on palestinian ground.

Israel on your border. Jihadist's on your border.

You have chosen The Mass Murdering/Beheading, Homophobic, Anti-Women, Anti-Christian/Buddhist/Hindu/etc., Jihadists.

Hope YOUR women understand.

..and yet at least 3 of the people here in this thread who vehemently oppose you are female.

So are you really claim to speak for women? Because most women I know will put not killing innocent children really high up on their list of priorities.

You cannot claim to be on the side of women when you support the murder of their children.

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Reality Internet Personality

..and yet at least 3 of the people here in this thread who vehemently oppose you are female.

Supposedly female.

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..and yet at least 3 of the people here in this thread who vehemently oppose you are female.

Supposedly female.

To you perhaps but I have met one and a friend has met the others. So yes female.

As to you? your post suggest male, but, well you are currently unknown.

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There is a hypothesis that the reason SETI has not been sucessful is that when a civilization reaches a certain point it self distructs. I ask if that is what is happening in the mideast?

There is another hypothesis that ET has seen what goes on here on earth and has wisely decided to avoid contact at all costs. The conflict in the middle east is just one example among several.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

There is a hypothesis that the reason SETI has not been sucessful is that when a civilization reaches a certain point it self distructs. I ask if that is what is happening in the mideast?

There is another hypothesis that ET has seen what goes on here on earth and has wisely decided to avoid contact at all costs. The conflict in the middle east is just one example among several.

+1