Regarding recent events in Gaza, Ben White, a freelance British journalist specializing in Palestine/Israel, writing in The Electronic Intifada on 19 June 2007 in an article entitled, Decoding the media’s Palestinian “civil war”, penned the following insight:
Major news stories from Palestine/Israel are often accompanied by what becomes a self-reinforcing “vocabulary,” typically generated by Israeli government ministries or other propaganda outlets, and then picked up by the Western media. A classic example was the redeployment of Israeli settlers and military from the Gaza Strip in 2005, which was successfully packaged as a “disengagement” that pitted “Israeli against Israeli,” in a “painful compromise.” This kind of marketing exercise often works even when there are widely available contradictory reports, such as how “disengagement” was openly trumpeted by Sharon and his advisors as a strategy for destroying the peace process.
How did it destroy the peace process or Oslo? By opening up the West Bank for Israel’s taking. This strategy would give Sharon and the right wing Zionists their dream: a Greater Israel from the Jordan River to the sea. This dream, after all, is what Israel has been all about at least since 1977 when Menachem Begin unleashed the settlers upon the God-given land in Judea and Samaria.
Certainly, the history shows that Israel, on whatever pretext it acted, has always succeeded in destroying peace initiatives, simply because, from Labor to Likud, Israel’s intention has always been to complete the Greater Israel dream of an Israel that includes Judea and Samaria (West Bank), and of course, the Jordan River border.
Israel therefore maintains its military occupation while land confiscations continue until this project is completed. Israel’s problem has been how to divert attention from this project and foist blame for failure of the peace process on the Palestinians. Events in Gaza this week were not different.
According to Ben White, “(the) solution was, as usual, lazy journalism and an almost total blackout on Israeli/US collusion in the dark events unfolding. Here then, is a guide to decoding the Palestinian “civil war,” presented as a series of oft-repeated, yet entirely misleading, clichés.”
Ben White lists them as follows:
The Palestinian Authority actually has any authority
The Palestinian Authority (PA) is regularly presented in the mainstream media as having the authority, independence, and jurisdiction of a state, equivalent to Israel. Yet despite the misleading name, the PA’s writ does not extend beyond the civic affairs of several dozen isolated cantons in the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Its law and order officials cannot travel from one canton to the other without the permission of the Israeli occupation forces. Look a bit deeper, and in fact, one discovers that the PA was designed specifically to thwart genuine Palestinian “authority,” to keep Palestinian sovereignty solely rhetorical, while Israel continues its colonization. The Angry Arab website quoted Palestinian writer Rashad Abu Shawir as saying of Hamas and Fatah that they are “fighting over an illusory authority.” Read between the lines even in the mainstream media, and this picture emerges. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert greeted Abbas’ formation of a new cabinet by saying that “a Palestinian government which is not a Hamas government is a partner and we will co-operate with it.” It is Israel that decides who represents the Palestinian people, and even what authority these representatives will enjoy.
The Hamas victory in Gaza risks creating a “two state Palestine”
Quickly after Hamas had completed their victory in Gaza, talk became of a “two state Palestine.” This rhetorical device, apart from simplifying a more complicated political reality, also conceals the fact that Israel has already severed the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, not to mention East Jerusalem. It even eludes the still bigger picture, that the Gaza Strip is not even two percent of historic Palestine, and that the Palestinian people have been fragmented into the refugees (themselves split geographically, socially, etc.), those living in Israel, and those under occupation in the post-’67 territories. The West Bank itself has been fragmented by incessant Israeli colonization into a thousand territorial shards. Never mind the alleged Hamas/Fatah “two states” — Israel has been busy implementing its plan for a 100 “state” solution.
The conflict is a fight between the secular moderates of Fatah, and the extremist Islamists of Hamas
This is sometimes trimmed even further to simply become, in the words of BBC correspondent Paul Reynolds, “the wider struggle between moderation and extremism in the Arab and Muslim world.” Suddenly, the fact that groups within Fatah have been prominent in the resistance of the intifada (the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades for example), is forgotten. Moreover, what is also ignored is the fact that Hamas have openly stated that their fight is not against Fatah per se, but against element within Fatah, notably Dahlan and his associates, who continue to work with the US and Israel. Numerous examples have born this out, including: an amnesty for Fatah commanders in the Gaza Strip, calls for dialogue by the Hamas leadership, apparent pre-operation coordination between Hamas and sympathetic Fatah officials, and the fact that several high-profile Fatah officials have remained untouched in Gaza. The struggle, then, is between a Palestinian leadership eager for approval from Israel and the US, and those who prioritize resistance.
Hamas’ actions in Gaza was a coup
Q. When an elected government is boycotted, its ministers kidnapped, and its defeated rival armed by hostile powers, what do you call it when this same government defends itself? A. A coup.
What sounds like a bad joke is in fact exactly how some — from newspaper editorials to the UK Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett — have chosen to describe what happened in Gaza. By contrast, this report from Reuters clarifies matters somewhat:
The US government began to lay the ground for President Mahmoud Abbas to dismiss the Hamas-led Palestinian government at least a year before the Islamist group’s violent takeover of the Gaza Strip last week.
Western, Israeli and Palestinian official sources said over the weekend that, far from being an ad hoc response to Hamas’s offensive, Abbas’s declaration of a state of emergency and his replacement of a Hamas prime minister with Western favorite Salam Fayyad marked the culmination of months of backroom deliberations, planning and US prodding
Many Western officials and analysts see the offensive as a pre-emptive strike by Hamas before Washington could build up Fatah. Hamas says it made its move against a US-backed coup.
Virginia Tilley, on The Electronic Intifada, described how Abbas’ response to the Hamas show of strength was a series of entirely illegal and dubious moves, all of which were greeted with praise and congratulations by Israel, the EU and the US. It seems that in Palestine, as elsewhere in the Middle East, it is not democracy that is required, but subservience.
The new Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is an “independent”
When Abbas appointed Fayyad as the new Prime Minister, you rarely saw the man’s name reported without an accompanying reference to his apparent lack of affiliation or bias. Strange then, that a neutral should be so popular with Washington.
Here, “independent” means that Fayyad has previously worked for the World Bank and IMF, enjoys a good relationship with Condoleezza Rice, is the favourite of EU and American diplomats — and whose electoral list won a mere 2.4 percent in the same parliamentary vote that Hamas won.
Who in the US or UK read or heard anything close to truth in the media? If one picked up a newspaper, turned on the nightly news, or logged onto a mainstream news site, any or all five of these cliches were likely found. A simple interpretation is that there is a reluctance by the mainstream media to acknowledge US and Israeli disregard for Palestinian self-determination, while it misrepresents the Palestinian government as consisting of democratic institutions, which actually rule over Palestine, and hides the reality that Palestine operates under a military government that has been actively involved in colonizing Palestinian land.
Once again, events from Palestine are being distorted and misrepresented by a compliant media, according to Ben White.
Ahmed Yousef, a senior political adviser to Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, was unapologetic in an op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post to speak the truth, that the US-Israel strategy actually failed:
The Palestinian National Authority apparently joins the list of elected governments targeted or toppled over the past century by interventionism: nations that had the courage to take American rhetoric at face value and elect whomever they would. No doubt some in Washington persist in the fiction that the United States is following a “road map” to democracy for Palestinians, just as others believe the Iraq war has been a sincere exercise in nation-building. Neoconservative strategists have miscalculated, however, and Hamas is stronger than ever.
For the first time in months, Gaza is secure. This may be a momentary peace as Israel prepares an attempt to retake parts of Gaza. Yet neither blunt force nor U.S. subterfuge will extinguish Palestinian aspirations for self-governance, free from outside interference.
To repeat, neither blunt force nor U.S. subterfuge will extinguish Palestinian aspirations for self-governance, free from outside interference. Nor will media distortion or fabrications of the reality in the mainstream media change that fact.
Will Abbas’ new government form the basis of a real peace movement? Don’t count on it. When Olmert proposed his own “convergence plan” it was leaked that he believed it would only be necessary to dismantle “ten maybe twenty” of the 150 Israeli settlements (towns and cities) built on the West Bank. Later, he inadvertently blurted out the opinion that a peace settlement with the Palestinians might be had in, “maybe five years.”
The only question to be asked at this point is: how will Israel succeed in avoiding yet another peace initiative. It will be interesting to watch.
shergald, who apparently has come out for Hamas, informs us that “Virginia Tilley, on The Electronic Intifada, described how Abbas’ response to the Hamas show of strength was a series of entirely illegal and dubious moves[.]”
As an exemplar of the shergald method of argumentation, let’s examine what Tilley says in her article and compare her claims with the text of the Palestinian National Authority’s Amended Basic Law. Let’s take them up one-by-one in the same order she presents them. “Abbas,” she claims, “has has baldly trashed numerous provisions of the Basic Law, including:”
In its entirety, Article 45 reads:
Nothing there about who the President may appoint as a new Prime Minister. The only relevant provision I find in the Amended Basic Law is Article 79(4), which provides:
As we shall see below, however, when, as now, the Legislative Council is not in session, Article 43 gives “The President of the National Authority . . . the right . . . to issue decrees that have the power of law.” Abbas having lawfully dismissed Haniyeh, the Legislative Council not being in session, and a new Prime Minister being required, Article 43 suffices to empower President Abbas to rule by decree.
Articles 83 and 78 of the Amended Basic Law say no such thing, however.
Article 83(6) is the provision regarding the dismissal of a prime minister.
So, the effect of President Abbas’s dismissal of Haniyeh as prime minister is that the government is “considered dissolved.”
What about Article 78? Presumably, Tilley is thinking of Article 78(3), which provides:
You’ll notice that this provision applies only “upon the completion of the term of the Prime Minister.” In the present case, however, Haniyeh was sacked before the end of his term; he did not complete it.
It may be a defect of the Amended Basic Law, but although the terms of the President and the Legislative Council are specified — Presidency, Article 36, “interim phase”; Legislative Council, Article 47(3), “interim period” — no term is specified for the Prime Minister and other ministers. Inasmuch as Article 78(3) contemplates that the Prime Minister has a term, my best estimate is that it, too, is the interim period or phase, both of which presumably refer to the period between the signing of the Oslo Accord and a final status agreement. In all events, Haniyeh did not complete his term, hence Article 78(3) does not apply.
The problem is that, on the one hand, as we have seen above, the Amended Basic Law manifestly gives the President the right to sack the Prime Minister. On the other hand, as Tilley observes, Article 79(4) provides that “Neither the Prime Minister nor any of the Ministers shall assume their duties until they have obtained the confidence of the Legislative Council.”
If the Legislative Council is not in session (and, as Tilley suggests, may not be able to meet), does that mean that the Palestinian National Authority is left without a government? No. A constitution is not a suicide pact. Accordingly, we have to consider the best solution permitted by the text to deal with emergencies of this type, that is, the Legislative Council not being in session.
The answer is found in Article 43, which authorizes the President to rule by decree:
So, President Abbas does have the authority, by decree, to authorize a new Prime Minister and new Cabinet to take office and govern until such time as the Legislative Council is able to be convened. Rejecting this conclusion doesn’t really make any difference: the President still is empowered to govern by decree. There is no reason to doubt his authority, therefore, to decree that he will exercise his governing authority through subordinates to whom he assigns particular powers and responsibilities.
So what? We have been considering a situation like the current one when the Legislative Council is not in session and, according to Tilley, may not be able to meet. In the meantime, President Abbas’s actions are lawful.
True enough, but irrelevant because President Abbas has not suspended the Legislative Council. If it is unable to muster a quorum, the reason presumably is that Israel, largely in response to the abduction last summer of Corporal Shalit, has jailed a large number of its members.
First, he has not (yet) done so. But second, bearing in mind the principle that a constitution is not a suicide pact, Tilley once again is mistaken. Whatever may be the case when the Legislative Council is in session or can be called into session, if Tilley is correct that that is not possible, then Article 43 applies and President Abbas is authorized, by decree, to issue a law for the holding of new elections.
True, but irrelevant. However it may be styled colloquially, the new Fayyad government is not an “emergency government” in a constitutional sense. It is simply a new government, subject to the terms of the Amended Basic Law.
Glad you didn’t disagree with Ben White. Obviously, no one can.
And don’t you mean say, No to boycotts of racism? Or are you calling the British, Irish, Scotch, and Canadians involved in boycotts, and the many organizations involved in divestment, including of course the American religious organizations, “racists?”
is being unable defend the substance of what you cut, paste, and present us.
An elementary point that may have escaped you is that choosing to discuss one of the many parts of your cut-and-past job does not entail agreement with the many parts not discussed.
Meanwhile, explain if you can your recent statement: “The Palestinian suicide bomber of the second Intifada was not a terrorist, but an avenger.”
the stupidest kind of argument is the argument over whether or not a suicide bomber is a terrorist or a freedom fighter.
Suicide bombing civilians is terrorism. People that do it and encourage others to do it are terrorists engaging in terrorism. The only question that matters is how to get them to stop.
The reality is that terrorism is a specific kind of violence have distinct motives. Perhaps looking it up will clarify the air. Neither Palestinian nor Israeli violence falls into this category. Or if you wish to redefine terrorism, then of course, “killing civilians” as the main criterion, leaves Israel, and in fact, America during the second world war, somewhat in a sematic quandry.
Myself, I prefer to describe the killing of civilians by Palestinians and Israelis alike as “atrocities,” rather than invoking the notion of terrorism, whose description neither fits. Judge for yourself, then, judge who is the greatest terrorist, based on civilian body counts.
Like most Americans, Alison Weir, the editor of a small-town newspaper in California, knew very little about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, other than what she had gleaned from the evening news or newspaper headlines. As a journalist, her attention was on issues much closer to home. Neither a muslim nor a jew, she nevertheless became more curious about the topic of the Palestinian uprising. And as she researched it, she became increasingly suspicious that the American media were not telling us the whole story. Months later, she traveled to the occupied territories as an independent journalist to find out for herself what the U.S. media seemed to be omitting. Three months after returning from Palestine, Alison Weir quit her job and founded If Americans Knew, an organization dedicated to quantifying the ways in which the American media was misinforming the public about the conflict. Ms. Weir explains her group’s methodology, analyzes the data, and reports on the key findings.
If Americans Knew can be linked to here: http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/sides.html
Alison Weir, in her documentary Off the Charts, noted the following:
Before a single suicide bomber had entered Israel after the start of the Second Intifada, sometimes called, after Sharon’s provocative visit to the Temple Mount, the al Aqsa Intifada, during its first month, 27 Palestinian children had been killed by Israeli Defense Forces in the West Bank and Gaza, the youngest only four months of age, and the majority due to gunshots to the head. Numerous children were also wounded. In the first three months alone, 159 children lost an eye presumably to rubber bullets shot from IDF rifles. Clearly the IDF were intentionally targeting these children, aiming at their heads with either rubber bullets or real bullets in the case of the child kills. We are talking here about a trained, mechanized army versus civilians, children participating in the intifada, the nonviolent resistance instituted by child and teenage Palestinian boys and girls. Oh, yes. Let’s be fair. We did hear that an Israeli soldier lost his eye from a rock thrown by a Palestinian boy from a pretty IDF spokeswoman, but it was the only such incident reported in three years.
In addition to these children, many more innocent adult civilians were killed, in the month before suicide bombings commenced. If terrorism is the intentional killing of civilians, then clearly, Israel’s armed forces were deep into terrorism, state sponsored terrorism, long before the Palestinians engaged in it to any degree. As a people fighting a military occupation, it would seem that the ultimate cause of all of these horrors on both sides rests with Israel and the purpose for which it continued its long occupation, the stealing of Palestinian lands.
See Alison Weir’s short documentary, Off The Charts: Media Bias and Censorship in America for the names, ages, places, and dates of these child killings.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5600677940569035557&q=Alternate+Focus
To be accurate, there were sporadic bombing incidents engineered by Hamas extremists in Israel during the Oslo period. None at all occurred between 1998 and 2000. But the strong resumption of attacks after 2000, over fifty in the first year, was directly related to civilian and child killings by IDF, and it was not just Hamas, but Islamic Jihad and other Fatah associated organizations that were involved.
This Time.com article apprises of what motivated them:
“Until recently most Palestinians believed they had alternatives to the kind of militancy practiced by Hamas. For years after the 1993 Oslo peace accord, which brought limited self-rule to the Palestinians and the prospect of an independent state, polls showed a strong majority of Palestinians supporting the peace process with Israel and only a minority endorsing suicide bombings. Thus, in their headhunting, the fundamentalists were limited to stalwart followers of their doctrine, which holds that any kind of peace with Israel is anathema. Even then, Hamas and Islamic Jihad had to cajole–some might say brainwash–young men into believing that the rewards of paradise outweighed the prospects of life on earth.
But with the breakdown of the peace process in the summer of 2000 and the start of the latest intifadeh that September, the martyr wannabes started coming to Hamas–and they didn’t require persuading. “We don’t need to make a big effort, as we used to do in the past,” Abdel Aziz Rantisi, one of Hamas’ senior leaders, told TIME last week. The TV news does that work for them. “When you see the funerals, the killing of Palestinian civilians, the feelings inside the Palestinians become very strong,” he explained.”
From the mouth of Rantisi, but it also motivated Fatah supporters, to exact revenge for the killing of Palestinian civilians. Revenge is not a formal use of terrorism. See Alison Weir’s film, Off The Charts, at Google Video.
(Why Suicide Bombing Is Now All The Rage)
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101020415-227546,00.html
This commentary is from an article by Rami Khouri, editor of the Beirut newspaper, The Daily Star, which cynically denounced Olmert’s statements professing concern for the well-being of Palestinian children:
(Ehud Olmert’s Profound Ethics and Deep Lies)
http://www.ramikhouri.com/
“For anyone interested in the facts about the impact of Israeli policies on Palestinian children, a good place to start is the carefully checked data disseminated by the Palestinian Nongovernmental Organization Network (www.palestinemonitor.org). Their data is compiled and verified on the ground by the Ramallah-based Health Development Information and Policy Institute, which has been honored by the World Health Organization for its work in promoting Palestinian health needs. So these people know what they are talking about when it comes to health conditions on the ground in Israeli-occupied Palestine. Some of the facts they provide are as follows.
In just the first two years of the second intifada, from September 2000 to November 2002:
The Israeli army killing of Palestinian children continues apace. In its annual report May 16, the respected global human rights organization Amnesty International accused the Israeli army of killing 190 Palestinians, including 50 children, last year (2005).”
Here is some commentary from Jonathan Cook on a grandmother suicide bomber:
“If one thing offers a terrifying glimpse of where the experiment in human despair that is Gaza under Israeli siege is leading, it is the news that a Palestinian woman in her sixties — a grandmother — chose last week to strap on a suicide belt and explode herself next to a group of Israeli soldiers invading her refugee camp.
Despite the “Man bites dog” news value of the story, most of the Israeli media played down the incident. Not surprisingly — it is difficult to portray Fatma al-Najar as a crazed fanatic bent only the destruction of Israel.
It is equally difficult not to pause and wonder at the reasons for her suicide mission; according to her family, one of her grandsons was killed by the Israeli army, another is in a wheelchair after his leg had to be amputated, and her house had been demolished.
Or not to think of the years of trauma she and her family have suffered living in a open-air prison under brutal occupation, and now, since the “disengagement”, the agonising months of grinding poverty, slow starvation, repeated aerial bombardments, and the loss of essentials like water and electricity.
Or not to ponder at what it must have been like for her to spend every day under a cloud of fear, to be powerless against a largely unseen and malign force, and to never know when death and mutilation might strike her or her loved ones.
Or not to imagine that she had been longing for the moment when the soldiers who have been destroying her family’s lives might show themselves briefly, coming close enough that she could see and touch them, and wreak her revenge.
Yet Western observers, and the organizations that should represent the very best of their Enlightenment values, seem incapable of understanding what might drive a grandmother to become a suicide bomber. Their empathy fails them, and so does their humanity.
Just at the moment Fatma was choosing death and resistance over powerlessness and victimhood — and at a time when Gaza is struggling through one of the most oppressive and ugly periods of Israeli occupation in nearly four decades — Human Rights Watch published its latest statement on the conflict. It is document that shames the organization, complacent Western societies and Fatma’s memory.”
So who is the terrorist here? Both? Or are we to accept Israeli and US propaganda that it is perfectly fine for Israel to kill five times the numbers of Palestinian children and civilian adults, but to call Palestinians, terrorists, when they retaliate and kill Israelis.
Anyone who kills civilians, especially children, deserve to be called terrorists. But the concept just doesn’t apply here unless you are a State Department representative, like Burns, selling Israeli propaganda and Israeli mitigation. These are atrocities committed by two peoples interested in continuing and stopping, respectively, the stealing of land in the West Bank. And that is the only reason these atrocities continue.
So ultimately who is to blame here for these atrocities?
Again, this is a stupid argument.
I didn’t say the Israelis don’t engage in terrorism, I said that suicide bombers targeting civilians are terrorists engaging in terrorism. That is beyond dispute and arguing is stupid.
If you want to make a moral equivalency argument, go ahead. Strapping a bomb to yourself and walking into a crowded civilian area is terrorism. It is intended to terrorize people.
The questions is, how do we get people to stop engaging in terrorism?
The answer to that question depends on the conflict, but it never means ignoring all their grievances and defeating them by brute force.
Once again, you have defined terrorism subjectively as the killing of civilians which is simply not as it is defined historically, as having a political or religious motive. Terrorism is defined by its motives, not by the victims that are killed. For that matter, there is terrorist violence that does not entail the killing of civilians, but merely physical damage.
Before the State Department created its own definition, here is how terrorism was defined:
Wikipedia
Terrorism is a term used to describe violence or other harmful acts committed (or threatened) against civilians by groups or persons for political, nationalist, or religious goals. As a type of unconventional warfare, terrorism means to weaken or supplant existing political landscapes through capitulation, acquiescence, or radicalization, as opposed to subversion or direct military action.
Free Dictionary
terrorism – the calculated use of violence (or threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature; this is done through intimidation or coercion or instilling fear
Proposed Definitions of Terrorism
1. League of Nations Convention (1937):
“All criminal acts directed against a State and intended or calculated to create a state of terror in the minds of particular persons or a group of persons or the general public”.
2. UN Resolution language (1999):
criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or other nature that may be invoked to justify them“. (GA Res. 51/210 Measures to eliminate international terrorism)
Peace, Propaganda, & The Promised Land (with Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, Arik Ackerman, founder of Rabbis for Human Rights, and many others) will give you some better idea as to Israel’s intent to turn the suicide bombings against the Palestinians.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6604775898578139565&q=peace%2C+propaganda%2C+%26+the+pr
omised+land&hl=en
Here are some comments from the documentary:
Rabbi Michael Lerner, Founder & Executive Director, Tikkun Magazine: “When you have a population that is being occupied, when their fundamental human rights are systematically being denied, when they are not allowed to move from city to city and place to place, without a huge amount of harassment, when they are being subject to torture, when people are essentially in desperate conditions, it is not a surprise that they are going to be very, very angry. There is no understand by the public media, or the American media, what creates this circumstance. Israel occupies, people strike at Israel against that occupation. They use means I think are wrong means, namely, the terror, and then Israel imposes punishment on the entire people, which creates a climate which makes it easier to recruit.”
Major Stav Adivi, reserves, Israeli Defense Forces, Israel: “we have to understand that these (suicide bombings) are the effects of the occupation.”
Robert Jensen, Professor of Journalism, University of Texas-Austin: “In contrast to the international press, in American media, there is a reversal of cause and effect in that the occupation is framed as a response to the suicide bombings. All of the Palestinian actions are attacks and Israel actions retaliation, is meaningful. Retaliation suggests a defensive stance against violence initiated by someone else. It places a responsibility for the violence on the party provoking the retaliation. In other words, Palestinian violence like suicide bombings is seen as cause and the origin of the conflict. Since the September 11 attack on the US, Israel’s PR strategy has been to frame all Palestinian actions, violent or not, as terrorism. To the extent that they can do that they have repackaged the illegal occupation as part of the war on terrorism.”
News headlines: “This is Israel’s war on terrorism. F16s hit a Palestinian in the Gaza Strip this morning….The case the Israelis are trying to make: this is no different than what the US is doing in Afganistan (air attacks in the West Bank)…Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared on television tonight, that he was determined to root out what he called `the terrorist infrastructure.'”
Propaganda, obviously.
So the myth of the Palestinian terrorist, who just happens to be fighting a long and incessant military occupation that the UN has called illegal, continues. During the second Intifada, as the above data I provided make clear, the motives for the suicide bomber were vengeful or retaliatory, for civilians killed by Israel defense forces, killings which started a month before any suicide bomber entered Israel. You have Rantisi’s observation concerning motivation.
So call Palestinians terrorists if you will, but you might as well use the term SOB. Pretty much it means the same thing. And the same applies to Israel in its killings of Palestinian civilians. So, is the Israeli pilot to unleashes a US made bomb on Palestinian homes in the West Bank or Gaza and kills dozens of civilians a terrorist, i.e., killing civilians, or just a SOB.
I prefer to see them on the same grounds, whereas defenders of Israel, like one of the people, like to see Israel as the innocent victim, a state that would never engage in killing civilians.
Give me a break.
Give me a break. I never said a word about Israel’s conduct. You can’t call terrorism something else just because you consider retaliatory. That’s absurd. When the fuck has anyone committed terrorism when they didn’t consider it retaliatory?
Answer: never.
By definition, always. Retaliation has not been defined as a component of terrorism. Just look at suicide bombers in Iraq where the motive is clearly political. Just when has any of those attacks been described as having a retaliatory component?
Has anyone ever argued that Palestinian suicide bombers engaged in their acts for political or religious reasons? The purpose of terrorism is terror. It is not hard to appreciate that the term derives from its purpose, the attempt to influence a political or religious by creating fear in a population or government? Fear was not the purpose of Palestinian suicide bombers. Retaliation, eye for an eye, was. It was just pure vengence. It had no other goal.
So we disagree again.
But given your perspective, while you acknowledge that you were not discussing the Israeli atrocities in the West Bank, what is it that you would call those acts, the bombing, shelling, and shooting of innocent civilians? You do appreciate, don’t you, that many of the killings of Palestinians took place during cycles of violence and retaliation by Israeli defense forces.
PS: I will overlook your insult re. my stupidity if you will just do a little research on the topic and stop sounding so ignorant about it.
All the bombings in Iraq are retaliatory. Every one of them. This idea that one side has a pure motive because they didn’t start it, or whatever, is pure foolishness.
Terrorism as a tactic is self-defeating. Many if not most of Israel’s actions are self-defeating (whether you define them as terrorism or not).
I’m not taking sides in the I/P conflict here. I’m saying that suicide bombing is terrorism. Bombing mosques is terrorism. Dropping bombs on civilian populations is not terrorism. It is, quite possibly, a war crime. It has a similar effect to terrorism. It has also proven to be ineffective.
You will not win an argument by fighting of the clear meaning of words.
When it comes to Palestinian terrorism the question is whether it helps the Palestinian cause. What can Israel do to stop terrorism. What are they doing to perpetuate it. How can we help?
What we call things is of secondary importance. And it is not justifiable to target civilians as means of coercion, whether the Israelis do it or the Palestinians do it, or Americans or Iraqis. It’s ineffective and it is wrong.
You are preaching to the choir when it comes to the morality of this issue as well as the political damage that has occurred for the Palestinians. But I certainly can’t agree with your take on terrorism, which you contend is simply killing civilians.
What is perhaps the worse consequence of the terrorist meme is the decontextualization that you and others persist in when you damn Palestinians for their retaliatory acts, but let Israelis off the hook as being merely on the defensive against it, rather than being its root cause. This is pure Israeli propaganda and a good part of Peace, Propaganda, & The Promised Land covers it fairly well. I have quoted enough data to contradict that proposition. I have also never heard anyone yet claim that Palestinians engaged in terrorism in retaliation for Israeli war crimes on the West Bank, a lot of which seemed closer to the Hatfields and the McCoys than to what is happening in Iraq with Al Qaeda terrorism, whose intent is obviously political, and not retaliatory. Your retaliatory theme concerning terrorism is a new one to me.
But believe what you like. No one will convince you otherwise that Palestinian suicide bombings during the second Intifada lacked political or religious motivation.
That is just an asinine proposition. There was no political motivation to the second intifada? Hilarious. Also hilarious, most of the bombings in Iraq are political.
Over a half million Iraqis are dead, mostly by their own hands. And you see no cycle of retaliatory violence? Is score settling for Saddam’s cruel reign a political act or a retaliatory act? The conversation is pointless.
These are conflicts rooted in politics but long sense taken over by a cycle of retaliation. That’s the nature of the conflicts. It is what makes them so intractable.
And please don’t insult me by suggesting that I am adopting Israeli propaganda. You want my pro-Israeli point of view?
They haven’t done anything right since Camp David. Nothing. Every step has taken them a step away from a secure future. The last six years have been a total catastrophe for Israel, capped by the dumbest thing since the 1982 invasion of Lebanon…the 2006 invasion of Lebanon.
Look at the state of their leadership. Look at the state of Fatah. Look at America’s position. No strong leaders in the region at all. No hope. No pathway to hope. And the second Intifada was also the dumbest thing the Palestinians have done in their entire history. Utterly self-defeating and depressingly stupid.
You’re just arrogant, and there’s little point in carrying on this conversation.
I agree.