Israel attacks Gaza

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Somehow I feel indiscriminately firing missiles into civilian residential areas would not be high on my list of possible solutions.
What about simple rockets?

It would be a proportionate response, shoot a few hundred of the unguided things at Palestinian population centers, or maybe send in some suicide bombers for good measure.
 
So Israel attacks Gaza and the news is all over it.

Israel says the reasons for the attacks is due to numerous rocket attacks against them in recent days.

Why were there no reports on this? Does the media only think it is news when it is Israel doing the attacking, or did these attacks just never happen?

Or did I simply miss it?

Someone enlighten me, please.
 
So Israel attacks Gaza and the news is all over it.

Israel says the reasons for the attacks is due to numerous rocket attacks against them in recent days.

Why were there no reports on this? Does the media only think it is news when it is Israel doing the attacking, or did these attacks just never happen?

Or did I simply miss it?

Someone enlighten me, please.

300+ people die at once when Israel attacks, single digits die over the last couple years by Hamas attacks. Do you really need to jump to bias to explain this?
 
What about simple rockets?

It would be a proportionate response, shoot a few hundred of the unguided things at Palestinian population centers, or maybe send in some suicide bombers for good measure.

Or perhaps - maybe I'm just batshit crazy - killing civilians isn't the answer??!?
 
300+ people die at once when Israel attacks, single digits die over the last couple years by Hamas attacks. Do you really need to jump to bias to explain this?

Do you really need to jump to conclusions?

I have no bias on this whatsoever. I honestly wanted to know why there is so much coverage when Israel attacks, while you can hear a pin drop when Hamas attacks.

Israel says it is counterattacking due to recent Hamas attacks. Is there any information out there as to the nature of these attacks? Or is Israel making it more than it really is?

And really, does it matter if there are lesser amounts of people dying in one attack vs. the other? It's still an attack.
 
I have no bias on this whatsoever. I honestly wanted to know why there is so much coverage when Israel attacks, while you can hear a pin drop when Hamas attacks.

I think it's because random rocket shelling from the Palestinian territories is not unique and goes on relatively regularly (and frequently), but with very few casualties. This is because the areas that are just north of Gaza are not particularly populated, and because the rockets are crude and unguided. I am not sure what the numbers are, but I think that Hamas has killed less than 20 Israelis while in power in Gaza, and something like 2 or 3 in the recent rocketing. Not to say that this is not a tragedy and not to say that because they are crude and ineffective, this is okay, but just due to the way our media works, I don't think they much care to report a handful of stray rockets a week in the Middle East when most of the readership probably doesn't care either at this point.

My best guess, anyway.
 
I think it's because random rocket shelling from the Palestinian territories is not unique and goes on relatively regularly (and frequently), but with very few casualties. This is because the areas that are just north of Gaza are not particularly populated, and because the rockets are crude and unguided. I am not sure what the numbers are, but I think that Hamas has killed less than 20 Israelis while in power in Gaza, and something like 2 or 3 in the recent rocketing. Not to say that this is not a tragedy and not to say that because they are crude and ineffective, this is okay, but just due to the way our media works, I don't think they much care to report a handful of stray rockets a week in the Middle East when most of the readership probably doesn't care either at this point.

My best guess, anyway.

I figured this was the case, but wasn't sure. I'd say you're pretty much on the ball there.

Well, I can understand Israel's frustrations then, but at the same time, they need to find a better way to deal with those attacks than just a straight pounding of Gaza. Time and time again, it just makes it worse.
 
I think it's because random rocket shelling from the Palestinian territories is not unique and goes on relatively regularly (and frequently), but with very few casualties. This is because the areas that are just north of Gaza are not particularly populated, and because the rockets are crude and unguided. I am not sure what the numbers are, but I think that Hamas has killed less than 20 Israelis while in power in Gaza, and something like 2 or 3 in the recent rocketing. Not to say that this is not a tragedy and not to say that because they are crude and ineffective, this is okay, but just due to the way our media works, I don't think they much care to report a handful of stray rockets a week in the Middle East when most of the readership probably doesn't care either at this point.

My best guess, anyway.


It's also because an alarm system exists in those areas. Every time a rocket is fired from the Gaza strip, the alarm is triggered and people have 10-60 seconds to take cover, depends from where exactly the rocket was fired from.
There's a very narrow time gap for taking cover, that's why parents won't allow kids to just play outside. Many homes have a `safe room` with thicker walls etc. there are concrete structure spread out in the towns over there, so people can take cover if the alarm is on when they are outside.

I believe all of this helped to decrease the number of casualties from the numerous attacks in the last 8 years.

Besides that, after each attack many people are diagnosed as trauma victims, many of them are children. There was an intensive care unit in the city of Shderot to treat people who are damaged mentally; I think it got cancelled because of budget issues.
 
Here's some right wing opinions on the current struggles.

Hamas Fantasy Rules by The Editors on National Review Online

Hamas Fantasy Rules
By the Editors


Israel has been extremely dilatory in responding to the aggression of Hamas, but nobody doubted that the day of reckoning would come. Hamas is never going to change its belief that it has a God-given mission to destroy Israel, and the capacity to do so.

Since 2001, something on the order of 4,000 missiles, and the same number of mortar shells, have been fired from Gaza at civilian targets miles into Israel. Since taking power in Gaza, Hamas has split the Palestinians into two irreconcilable camps, with themselves as Islamists and Fatah under Mahmoud Abbas as putative nationalists (albeit with their own jihadist elements). While the latter camp has been negotiating for a peace settlement, Hamas has been preparing openly for the final war its leaders envision, asserting at every opportunity that it will never under any circumstances settle for the two-state solution that most of the world hopes for. The truce Hamas offered was an opportunity to stockpile weapons and undergo training. Hamas interpreted Israeli restraint as evidence that Israel was unable to defend its sovereignty and was therefore actually on the path to defeat and national dissolution.

For Hamas, the decision to resume hostilities carries no political risk. At best, they will kill some Israelis, boast of their heroic stature, and crow that Fatah can no longer claim to represent Palestinians. At worst, they will suffer a mass of casualties and make propaganda out of that, as though they themselves were not responsible for these horrors. Hamas is already cashing in on opportunistic pronouncements by the likes of President Nicolas Sarkozy of France that the Israeli measures are “disproportionate,” or the burbling of Ban Ki-Moon, the ineffable United Nations secretary general, that “violence” is “unacceptable” — as though Israel and Hamas were moral equivalents.

An essential factor in this tragic situation is the readiness of Arabs and Muslims everywhere to take the Hamas fantasy for reality. In Cairo, Damascus, or Tehran, many evidently think it right and proper and normal for Hamas to keep up a barrage of missiles and rockets while Israelis are supposed to accept the punishment, while measures of self-defense on the part of Israel are to be considered criminal. The 2006 spell of fighting between Israel and Lebanon ended without a sufficiently clear-cut resolution, and this has led to the widespread delusion in the Arab and Muslim world that the destruction of Israel is indeed a real prospect.

Israel wants there to be no mistake about that again. At present, its ground forces are in position to complete any mopping up of Hamas military equipment that the air force has not dealt with. The disarmament of Hamas is an essential prerequisite of peace, for unless and until that happens, the Palestinian state must remain stillborn. The Israelis are fighting to free themselves from an unscrupulous opponent, but over and above that, the great hope is that they eventually will be able also to free the Palestinians — not only from leaders who are terrorizing them, but from the delusion that choosing such leaders can lead to anything but ruin.
 
Wrong Story by Michael Ledeen on National Review Online

Wrong Story
The real problem is Iran.

By Michael Ledeen


Everyone in the Middle East knows that the serious component of the Battle of Gaza is all about Iran. The Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, recently warned that Iran is trying to “devour” the Arab world. Mohammed Abdallah Al Zulfa, of the Saudi Arabian Shura Council, reminded Alhurra’s viewers that “Iran is the big threat in today’s world, supporting all the terrorists from Hamas to Hezbollah to some other terrorists that we don’t know their names yet,” and that “Iran destabilized the region by supporting all the illegal activities and activists such as Hamas.” Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the Egyptian foreign minister, in a press conference in Anakara, ranted against Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, saying that the Iranian-run terror organization had “practically declared war on Egypt.”

So it is not totally surprising that Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman reportedly told the Israelis that Egypt wouldn’t oppose a quick strike designed to bring down Hamas, or that Palestinian Authority chief Abu Mazen blames Hamas, which is largely an Iranian proxy, for the fighting. Israeli opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu called for “toppling the Hamas rule over the [Gaza] Strip and uprooting the Iranian base there,” which is probably what most Arab leaders want, even as they prepare to denounce Israel at the upcoming Wednesday meeting of the Arab League (the best portrayal of which can be seen in David Lean’s magisterial film Lawrence of Arabia). It is also what the United States should want, instead of pursuing the mirage of a Middle Eastern peace that cannot possibly be accomplished so long as the mullahs rule in Tehran. They will continue their 30-year proxy war against the infidels until they either win or lose, and Israel will always be one of their prime targets. David Horvitz implores us to remember the Iranian connection, and he rightly says that at least some countries might support an action that defeats a major Iranian initiative.

The less serious component of the war has to do with domestic Israeli politics. The current crowd, Olmert/Livni/Barak, is facing an election in a couple of months and has no chance of being returned to office if mortars, missiles and rockets continue to fly into Israeli towns and cities from the Gaza Strip. Ergo, the air attack. There are those who believe that the Israeli Army will soon move into Gaza as well. As the 2006 war against the Iranians’ Hezbollah demonstrated, you can’t destroy a terrorist organization from the air alone, and Olmert/Livni/Barak lost a great deal of public support when they failed to eliminate Hezbollah. They certainly don’t want a repeat of that political debacle.

I would be surprised if the army does invade. These Israeli leaders have been minimalists, and an invasion of Gaza would require both a kind of nerve they have not shown before and the courage to challenge the global community of negotiators (a/k/a appeasers) and thereby risk losing their seat at the big dining-room tables of world capitals. Still, life is full of surprises, and if the air war fails to stop the missile, mortar, and rocket attacks from Gaza (and as of Monday evening, Washington time, they were still flying and still killing Israeli civilians), Olmert/Livni/Barak may feel compelled to take further risks.

Meanwhile, what of the terrorists? Some may be surprised that most of the pictures Hamas has provided to the international media have shown dead fighters, officials, and police, rather than civilians. True, very few civilians have been killed, but that has never stopped Hamas and its ilk from providing photographic “evidence” that later turned out to be phony. The presentation of their own dead is of a piece with their ideology; it is a glorification of martyrdom, part of a broader call to arms, a hymn to the cult of death that inspires the jihad. And the high priest of that cult is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has often spoken of martyrdom as the highest calling (for others, mind you, certainly not for himself). Please do not tell me that this cannot be, since the Iranians are Shiites and Hamas is Sunni; radical Shiites and Palestinian terrorists have been in cahoots for at least 37 years. Hamas gets weapons, training, intelligence, and money from the mullahs in return for doing their bidding. It’s all about Iran, you see.

And please don’t tell me that this only proves the urgency of diplomacy. It proves the opposite. There cannot be peace in the Middle East so long as the mullahs wage war and think they’re winning. All those martyrs are viewed as signs of progress in Tehran.

The Israelis know all this, just as they know that the mullahs are building an atomic bomb destined for Israeli territory. But Israel is a small country, despite the paranoid visions of some Western ideologues who think the Israelis run the world through espionage and lobbying. Iran is more than ten times the size of Israel, and even the most feisty Israeli shrinks from the thought of an open war with Tehran. So they are left to contend with the tentacles of the terrorist hydra, while the main body remains untouched. They may chop off a piece of Hamas or Hezbollah, but it will regenerate and grab them again.

Not that the defeat of Iranian proxies is a small matter. The United States thrashed their proxy, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and in so doing rounded up a considerable number of Iranian military and intelligence officers who were playing their usual role of consiglieri to the jihadis. Some senior Iranians have defected to the West, and the mullahs have still not managed to break the will of the pro-democracy dissidents in their own country, despite a record pace of killing that puts Iran in the running for the world’s leading executioner (they are currently running second only to China, whose population is about 20 times Iran’s).

This bespeaks a profound insecurity. It is the behavior of a regime that knows its people despise it, and, like all such tyrannies, it combines domestic terror with foreign adventure in order to preserve its position. For extras, the Iranian zealots at the top of the oppressive pyramid embrace an apocalyptic vision according to which the Last Days are upon us and the hoped-for coming of the Twelfth Imam will be best catalyzed by global bloodshed and chaos.

Thus, the best Israel can hope to accomplish is to buy time, praying that somehow or other the Iranian regime will fall before the mullahs launch their promised genocidal attack, or that the Israelis will find a way to destroy the atomic weapon before it is used against them, or that the West will, at the eleventh hour, recognize that Iran is a global threat and find a way to thwart it.

It’s a hell of a position to be in, and discussions of tactics and methods in Gaza address only a small part of the problem. The real problem isn’t even being discussed.

—Michael Ledeen is Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
 
Some sarcasm from Victor Davis Hanson

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Some Moderate Proposals [Victor Davis Hanson]


1) Request that 50% of Israel's air-to-ground missiles be duds to ensure greater proportionality.

2) Allow Hamas another 1,000 free rocket launches to see if they can catch up with the body count.

3) Have Israeli soldiers congregate in border barracks so that Hamas's random rockets have a better chance of killing military personnel, to ensure it can claim at least a few military targets.

4) Redefine "holocaust" to refer to deaths of terrorists in numbers under 400 to give greater credence to Hamas's current claims.

5) In the interest of fairness, allow Hamas to establish both the date that war is supposed to begin and the date when it must end.

6) Send Israeli military advisers to Hamas to improve the accuracy of their missiles.

7) Take down the barriers to return to Hamas a fair chance of getting suicide bombers back inside Israel.
 
Do you really need to jump to conclusions?

I have no bias on this whatsoever. I honestly wanted to know why there is so much coverage when Israel attacks, while you can hear a pin drop when Hamas attacks.

Israel says it is counterattacking due to recent Hamas attacks. Is there any information out there as to the nature of these attacks? Or is Israel making it more than it really is?

And really, does it matter if there are lesser amounts of people dying in one attack vs. the other? It's still an attack.

Oh, I read you asking people to "enlighten" you as sarcasm. There's a general argument made that Israel is the victim of anti-Israeli media bias that never reports the Palestinian attacks, only the Israeli reprisals.

If that was an honest question then mea culpa. Sorry. What anitram said.

I would hope as a ludicrous extreme people would realize that deaths do matter. A militant takes a potshot at an Israeli soldier, killing him. In retaliation, Israel nukes the Gaza Strip. If that response would be inappropriate, then we're just haggling over the exchange rate of Palestinian lives to Israel lives to figure what each side's life is worth.
 
Ezra Klein:
This blog is on a light schedule today and tomorrow due to various New Years related program activities, but it's worth quickly responding to Jonathan Chait's post on Israel and Palestine. Chait makes a common claim, which is that all analysis of the Israel/Palestinian conflict has to begin from a place of intentionality. "Hamas has a problem with Israel because Hamas believes Israel has no right to exist," he writes. "Israel has a problem with Hamas because Hamas believes Israel has no right to exist. If Hamas lay down all its weapons, Israel would lift its blockade. If Israel lay down all its weapons, Hamas would kill as many Israelis as it could."

There's truth to this. But it can also obscure more than it can reveal. One important disconnect in Israel/Palestine debate is that Israel's supporters tend to focus on what the Palestinians want while Palestine's supporters tend to focus on what the Israelis do. Israel's defenders, for instance, make a lot of Hamas's willingness to kill large numbers of civilians. Palestine's defenders make a lot of the fact that Israel actually kills large numbers of Palestinian civilians.

To make it more concrete, in July, the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem reported that 123 Israeli minors had been killed by Palestinians since the second intifada began in 2000, compared with 951 Palestinian minors killed by Israeli security forces. Israel's supporters emphasize that the children were not killed purposefully, but were collateral damage of targeted operations. By contrast, Palestinian suicide bombers have targeted children directly. Israelis define their struggle in contrast to the intentions of Hamas. Palestinians define their struggle in terms of the actions of the Israelis.

Without understanding this distinction, it's hard to understand the two sides of the conflict. Hamas survives because Palestinian society is radicalized against Israel. Palestinian society is radicalized against Israel because Israel's operations have devastated their society. Be assured that when Palestinians look at the 1,000 or so children killed by the Israeli armed forces, they do not comfort themselves with the fact that those deaths were accidental. And, indeed, a case can be made that collateral damage from air strikes in dense urban areas are not accidental. They are expected.

Conversely, Chait is correct to say that the Israelis see little hope of negotiation with an enemy that denies their basic claim to existence. They feel rightly threatened by the presence of Hamas, the oppressive reality of terrorism, and the hatred of their Arab neighbors. Israel is far stronger than Palestine, but it judges itself in constant danger.

There's no easy way to bridge the distance between these perspectives. As Aaron David Miller has written, "the prospects of reconciling the interests of an occupied nation with those of a threatened one [are] slim to none." The Israelis see themselves as threatened innocents, not oppressors. They point to the public statements of Hamas, and they are right. The Palestinians see themselves as an occupied people, not aggressors. They point to their death toll and the settlements, and they are right.

There is nothing specifically incorrect in the argument Chait draws. But the intellectual clarity of the distinction is so far from the lived experience from the Palestinians as to be meaningless. He says Hamas would kill more children if they could. The Palestinians say the Israelis kill more children. Which is why Israel's attack on Gaza was so unwise. The Palestinians just watched the Israelis slaughter dozens of children, mothers, and other innocents. Protestations that they deserved it because Hamas threatens to kill Israeli innocents will not make sense to them. And so the battle will continue, with Israel's supporters comforting themselves by looking at Hamas's stated intentions and Hamas's supporters justifying themselves by pointing towards the fresh graves of their dead. I don't know how you reconcile the interests of a threatened nation with an occupied one. But you have to start by recognizing the lived experience on both sides, not just one.
 
Unfortunately for everyone involved, it will always be Israeli overkill. Because most of Hamas' untargeted rocket launches and outposts are located in population centers.
 
In the middle of the desert.

Seriously, I have no recommendation. Just not surprised when Israel retaliates for months and months of shelling and hundreds of innocent people die.
 
In the middle of the desert.

Seriously, I have no recommendation. Just not surprised when Israel retaliates for months and months of shelling and hundreds of innocent people die.

Gaza, may be the most densly populated place on the planet. There are no open spaces there.

Some believe Israel pulled out of Gaza to get Hamas trapped in a tin can so they could snuff them out. You realize Hamas and the Gazans have been held in a choke hold by Israel, many are not surprised by these crude rockets flying out of Gaza.
 
I'm not shocked. But how does Israel deal with what they feel is a serious security issue?
 
it strikes me that the things Israel must do to keep itself secure wind up making it less secure.

i probably have a bit less sympathy for the "plight" of the Palestinians than most others who locate themselves on the leftward end of the political spectrum, because i do think the media response to anything that happens is disproportionate to the actual suffering involved. the Palestinians function like abortion does in the United States. they're a rallying point, a flashpoint of outrage for certain sections of the Arab world. but nothing ever really gets done, and more importantly, those who could do something make damn well sure that nothing gets done lest it remove one of whatever government's most powerful tools of political persuasion.

and the more i look at the situation, the more convinced i am that what causes the frenzy is not so much the conditions under which the Palestinians live, but the sheer fact that there are Jews there. i've been to many "peace" rallies in Europe, and there's always the undercurrent of anti-Semitism. always.
 
In a crowded waiting room in the afterlife, if you believe in such a thing, sits a recently deceased father of four who was also a loving husband and a loving grandfather. When he is approached by an angel, he is ushered off to a very warm and wonderful place and he speaks to the angel about his life on earth. As they discuss the family he left behind, the angel asks the man if he had any regrets in his relationships with his family. The man thinks for a second about his loving wife, his three daughters and their families, and then his oldest child the hardworking son who never married. He finally admits that he wished he was closer to his son, who often times seemed distant. The angel tells the man that his son, the workaholic who never married and always strived for his fathers approval, was a homosexual.

At first the man is shocked, how could it be? His son never told him, why? The angel reminded the father of how he raised his only son, his first child, how he pushed him so hard to be just like himself and never to compromise his beliefs because that would be a compromise of weakness. And besides, the son was afraid to tell the father because he knew deep down his father would never accept his lifestyle. This made the father very sad, he wished he could have known and loved his son completely and fully on earth. The father wondered would he ever be able to tell his son "its okay, i understand" and tell him he loved him no matter what. The angel assured the father that it would be okay, he would be able to tell his son what he wanted to. But it would be a very long time because his son was only 40 years old and he would live a long and productive life and the second half of his life would be much more fullfilling and he would have more freedom than the first part.

Back in the waiting room, two soldiers who are fresh arrivals were ushered in to what was becoming an increasingly crowded room. The soldiers are wearing different uniforms and they have just died fighting the same battle, from opposite sides. There is only one chair left in the waiting room, the one formerly occupied by the father who had been escorted out earlier. The younger soldier offers the chair to the older one, out of respect to his elder. The older man sits down and graciously thanks the younger man for the offer of the seat. As they wait they exchange pictures of their families that they carry in their wallets, and they each compliment the others children and lament on how they are going to miss them now that they have both passed.

Soon an angel arrives and asks both of the soldiers to accompany her to the warm and wonderful place together. As they begin to discuss their lives on earth, the angel asks each of the men what they regret most about having to lose their lives so early due to endless conflict that has been going on for as long as they could remember. Still holding the photo of his young wife and child, the younger soldier replies that he regrets he will not be around to see his child grow up and that he regrets that his young wife will have to raise the baby by herself, a conflict within the conflict that often gets overlooked.

The older soldier, with tears in his eyes, looks at the younger man and says that he shares in his regrets that the younger man would not be able to see his child grow. The older man admits that he himself was lucky in that respect, because his son was grown and had followed in his own footsteps and was still on the ground fighting the conflict. But if he could, he would tell his son to put down his guns and take his family and go far and away from the fighting. Of the war, the older man figured that it made a lot more sense "at the time" and he was just following orders as any good soldier would. The younger man agreed with him.

The two men stood up and hugged each other in a long embrace, and they faced the angel and said all they wished for now was peace and they wanted the ability to tell their families to stop the bloodshed and to enjoy the gift of life. Standing up and fighting for your rights is a worthy and nobel cause, even if that means standing up to end senseless bloodshed that has gone on for seemingly ever and accomplished nothing. It's a lot clearer picture from our current view, stated both men.

The angel looked thoughtful for a moment and asked both men to sit down. She advised them that they would get their wish, they would be able to talk to their families again and tell them everything that they had wanted to. The younger man could see his wife and child again and the older man could ask his son to lay down his arms. Both men seemed relieved at the "second chance" to speak to their families, until the angel explained fully why they would be given this opportunity. The angel spoke "this conflict will go on until the end of times, it has taken many men like yourselves and it will continue to take many more and make widows of many more women and orphans of many children. Your regret will cast no shadow on the leaders of nations and parties on earth who continue to destroy each other over land disputes, natural resources, and power. Your families will understand what you have to say to them, they will forgive you for what you have done. In fact your families have just arrived into our waiting room so I will bring them in to see you now..."

Pardon my ramblings, its new years day and im foggy. I won't participate in your discussion but i wanted to share that with you.
Happy New Year everyone, and hopefully peace on earth.
 
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and the more i look at the situation, the more convinced i am that what causes the frenzy is not so much the conditions under which the Palestinians live, but the sheer fact that there are Jews there.

It's disappointing to see you swallow up and regurgitate neo-conservative, imperialist, propaganda, ascribing opposition to Israel as 'anti-semitism' is really and ultimately no more and no less than an excuse to do nothing and pretend there isn't a problem.
 
It's disappointing to see you swallow up and regurgitate neo-conservative, imperialist, propaganda, ascribing opposition to Israel as 'anti-semitism' is really and ultimately no more and no less than an excuse to do nothing and pretend there isn't a problem.

Everyone recognizes there's a problem. But as Irvine put it, "nothing ever really gets done." God knows a lot of people have tried.

How would you go about fixing it financeguy?
 
Neocon imperialist dogs in Iran
The Iranian press watchdog shut down leading reformist newspaper Kargozaran on Wednesday over publication of a piece criticising Palestinian militants, the official IRNA news agency reported.

"Kargozaran has been banned over a media offence and the case has been referred to the court," Mohammad Parvizi, who is in charge of domestic media at the culture ministry, told IRNA.
He said the ban was ordered over "a piece yesterday which justifies the Zionist regime's crimes against humanity in Gaza and portrays the Palestinian resistance as terrorists who cause the deaths of children and civilians by taking up position in kindergartens and hospitals."

Kargozaran's director Morteza Sajadian confirmed the closure and said the piece in question was a statement by a radical pro-reform student group, the Office to Consolidate Unity.
"The statement was not supposed to be carried, it was mistakenly printed," he told AFP, hoping the ban would be only temporary.

Kargozaran's licence holder is the Executives of Construction, a political party close to former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

The paper, which started publication three years ago, has been a frequent target of attack from rival hardline media over its content, which has been perceived as hostile to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Under Ahmadinejad, Iranian newspapers, websites and news agencies of all political persuasions have been hit by a string of closures.

Iran is a staunch supporter of the Islamist Hamas movement which controls Gaza and does not recognise its archfoe Israel, which has been pounding the territory with a deadly air blitz for the past five days.
AFP: Iran shuts down leading reformist newspaper
 
It's disappointing to see you swallow up and regurgitate neo-conservative, imperialist, propaganda, ascribing opposition to Israel as 'anti-semitism' is really and ultimately no more and no less than an excuse to do nothing and pretend there isn't a problem.




far, far worse things happen in the world to other peoples. this is not to excuse anything. this is making distinctions between situations.

what makes this situation so unique is that there are Jews involved.
 
far, far worse things happen in the world to other peoples. this is not to excuse anything. this is making distinctions between situations.

what makes this situation so unique is that there are Jews involved.


The only reason why 'anti-semitism' is brought into it to obscure debate on the central issue - which is the theft of the Palestinians' land, and their eviction from that land. The issue is fundamentally about human rights - indeed, the most fundamental of all human rights, which is the right to property.
 
The only reason why 'anti-semitism' is brought into it to obscure debate on the central issue - which is the theft of the Palestinians' land, and their eviction from that land. The issue is fundamentally about human rights - indeed, the most fundamental of all human rights, which is the right to property.



so what do you have to offer? besides labels and pronouncements?
 
The only reason why 'anti-semitism' is brought into it to obscure debate on the central issue - which is the theft of the Palestinians' land, and their eviction from that land. The issue is fundamentally about human rights - indeed, the most fundamental of all human rights, which is the right to property.
Are Jews (and their descendants) who were evicted from Arab states when Israel was created entitled to restitution?

Is it only the illegal post-1967 settlements (an example of US dollars being funneled to defend religious nuts) which should be given back to the Palestinian people or is all of Israel illegitimate?

Is a two state solution justifiable, or should all of Palestine be wrested from Zionist control?

Is the plight of the Palestinians who are murdered by Israeli bullets more important than those killed by Arab states like Jordan?

Does violent resistance to occupation justify violence against civilians?

Should pro-Palestinian activists discriminate between secular nationalists and religious fundamentalists? People marching under a Hamas flag as a sign of national liberation in western countries fully ignore the oppressive social policies which that group has instituted in Gaza.

You aren't blind to the abuses of Israel, and definitely see the bias (justified or unjustified) from western nations in the conflict, but where do you draw the line.

What sort of Palestinian state do you want to see?

What sort of Israeli state do you want to see?

Beyond advocating resistance to occupation and state terrorism as a morally justified action what sorts of changes have to happen on both sides for any long term resolution?
 
The only reason why 'anti-semitism' is brought into it to obscure debate on the central issue - which is the theft of the Palestinians' land, and their eviction from that land. The issue is fundamentally about human rights - indeed, the most fundamental of all human rights, which is the right to property.



does Hamas not violate the human rights of the Palestinians when it does things that they know will provoke an disproportionate response from the Israelis? this is less to justify the Israeli response and point to the fact that it's great PR for Hamas when they can talk about 10 dead Palestinians for every 1 Israeli, so their actual strategy is to increase the suffering of the very people they are meant to defend. Hamas, and the rest of the Arab world, use the Palestinians to further their stated goal of the actual destruction of Israel, of wanting to push it into the ocean. this isn't about the Palestinians, really. it's about the existence of Israel. hence, that's why it is about the Jews, and always has been about the Jews. you are absolutely right, in practical terms, that the Palestinians do suffer at the hands of the Israelis. and often disproportionately. but the reasons behind that suffering are far grander and more sinister than your rhetoric acknowledges. Israel is continually provoked to beat up on a much weaker kid, and every time it does so, it only hurts it's own security because it inspires a generation of new recruits and it loses sympathy in the eyes of westerners who (perhaps with the best of intentions) want to reduce the situation to how Hamas wants you to see the situation (see! they're the *real* terrorists!).

and, as an aside, Hamas is democratically elected (and, thus, we know that "democracy" doesn't really solve anything in and of itself).
 
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