Israel/Gaza: Calling all UK forum members.

 

Thanks mate, besides prog, my other passion is history, namely military history as I find it simply fascinating (Mr Spock, hello) that humans are still so unbelievably short-sighted, ignorant, uneducated or most often "propaganda gullible" . I once had a spirited argument with another PA member who disputed the need for history , stating that only today counts!  Go around the world and smell the coffee I say. The first major revelation of anyone delving into history (read here : searching both sides rationale) is that you have to go to the conflict physically, talk to people on both sides , old and young and try (often helplessly) to understand. Believe smarter minds than we and I have tried without any result. Mainly because sane minds are generally VERY VERY quiet.  I am always stunned that people can live together in harmony for decades or even centuries , when due to some economic/political involvement , they become sudden BITTER enemies ( Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Lebanon among the more recent sad examples). Humans are so easily manipulatable by other humans, its patently ridiculous, we are all being led by one sided story telling. History teaches you that over and over again. Thanks to prog , we can accept diversity and open-mindedness. Mind you PA members are uniquely sane in their rethoric, perhaps because of the rebel musical style we enjoy. Need more rebels !

 

Haven't read everything that has happened since my mornings emotional tirade, only some choice bits about how not bothering to use perfect sentence structure in a forum post is the complete measure of someones intellect and that my sheep comment about following the media's portrail of the situation blindly is also true (same post).  By the way, citing Stephen Colbert does not make you look intelligent , it makes you look pretentious (and like a wool covered farm creature prone to use the expression "baaaa") but pretention does pass for intellect  on a college campus; a magical land of peace, love, speech codes, and biased teaching.  A land where Jon Stewart is the god of all truth and Colbert displays the true face of the evil conservative (light your torches everyone!).  Why I copied Epignosis' writing it that he made the point that "you can't believe everything you see on the news" much better than I did.  People always seek to look for moral relativity but there isn't any here.  Israel does not target children, Israel doesn't use children as shields and bombs and then when the cameras show up drag them out to display.  The media actively aids the terrorists (Israels actual targets, duh) by grabbing the sexiest image of a dead child, like the one Epignosis mentioned above, instead of doing their actual job which is to report the news accurately.  Sensationalized and biased journalism perpetuates the "evil Israel" stereotype and everyone is more than happy to go along with this because the palestinians fill the natural victims role.  They don't have their own country or an organized/advanced army (the media's measure of all evil, due to it's being "unfair") but what they do have is their own land which they would still have, untouched, if many among them didn't feel compelled to attack their neighbors so frequently.  If the palestinians are victims to anybody its factions within their own land but can you even be a victim if your content to look the other way?  You can debate the merit of the initial creation of Israel all day but the fact is that they have done everything to earn a right to exist since becoming a nation.  Don't enable the media's whitewash of the whole story compel you to sign petitions like this, petitions built on guilt and emotion (poor substitutes for fact and reason), which do nothing more than handcuff legitimate attempts to root out the actual terrorists.  If you find hunting down those who plan cafe bombings to be morally equal to the cafe bombings themselves then I'm sorry but that simply illogical. 

Lets try an exercise:

First, remove all religious aspects from your head. 

Second, imagine that within your own country there was a region which has always commited violent acts against the areas surrounding it.  Your country's government has done what it could on the international political stage to work with this regions leaders even though it knows that these leaders rarely show their true faces (to the media/world) and don't have complete control over the region themselves.  International public opinion drives major world bodies to pressure your government to simply let the region break away and form their own country even though you find this land important to your nation.  All this while regional leaders state they won't rest till they won't be happy untill all of your countries people are driven into the sea.  It isn't freedom from your country the terrorists want, it is your eradication.

Thirdly, imagine that decade after decade of negotiations have resolved nothing.  You've grown older, maybe raised a family, maybe not.  Every year you've lived here you've witnessed fellow countrymen blown apart by suicide bombers (many of which are children).  There only crime was calling this area their home and showing their faces in public locations; maybe attending school, maybe shopping, maybe dinning.  Everytime your government moves to react with force against those within this region who support and plan these attacks the international media shows up, its members all in competition for the sexiest story and the picture to go with it,  out of nowhere.  The media wasn't too concerned when your countrymen met their violent end but here they are now spreading claims of excessive force all over the world.  Suddenly, your country's measured military response to acts of terrorism coming from this region is viewed as excessive all over the world; especially in all those countries in which going out for a bite to eat doesn't carry the ever looming threat of winding up in a body bag.  Your country backs off and agrees to go back to the table.  The attacks on your people don't stop.

Now, consider honestly how you'd feel.  You were born and raised here.  You had nothing to do with the way your country was founded but are constantly told that you have no right to live here because of it's founding.  You look at how other countries came to be and can only shake your head at the hypocracy.  Even if it is feasible to move elsewhere you still have a strong attachment to the area, after all, everything you know is here.  The reasons they give for sending a child strapped with explosives that  blow his/herself up in a crowded square, do they really matter to you?  Negotiations continue to fail all while more bombings occur.  You just want for them to stop.  Your country has a very good military; one more than capable of removing the terrorist element and securing any border that might be be leaking more terrorists in.

For those of you in England (after all, this post is targets you) let me add a hypothetical example: Wales.  People from Wales are coming into say, Chester or Herefordshire (any bordering county they can really), strapped with bombs and blowing up as many English citizens as possible.  Now, apply everything from the above exercise and see where you stand.  Don't argue that it is ridiculous or that it wouldn't ever happen, not because that isn't true, because that isn't the point.

 

phew, hope that was a little more clear.  I don't believe that force is always necissary but in this situation it clearly is and I don't believe that petitions like this do anything but lengthen the cycle of violence.  This problem can be solved right now and hopefully it will be. Hopefully Israel will stand tough and achieve its objectives, which I believe as stated are: to kill leaders of the terrorist group Hamas and to destroy the tunnels militant groups use to smuggle arms.  Doens't really strike me as unreasonable, maybe I wasted my time with all the above

 

I don't necessarily agree with this statement.

 

Had the US listened to Maggie and continued to "destroy" the Iraqi threat in the initial conflict after the Iraqi army had been defeated then there would not have been the need for a second conflict. The number of lives saved would have been immeasurable. I don't find this gravely immoral at all, in fact the opposite.

 

There are a limited number of times that short term fixes can be applied, eventually the root cause has to be found and resolved. I get the feeling this is how Israel feel about the present situation. Right or wrong.