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Israels Grand Plot backfires in Gaza



By John J. Mearsheimer


Israelis and their American supporters claim that Israel learned its lessons well from the disastrous 2006 Lebanon war and has devised a winning strategy for the present war against Hamas. Of course, when a ceasefire comes, Israel will declare victory. Don’t believe it. Israel has foolishly started another war it cannot win.

The campaign in Gaza is said to have two objectives: 1) to put an end to the rockets and mortars that Palestinians have been firing into southern Israel since it withdrew from Gaza in August 2005; 2) to restore Israel’s deterrent, which was said to be diminished by the Lebanon fiasco, by Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, and by its inability to halt Iran’s nuclear program.

But these are not the real goals of Operation Cast Lead. The actual purpose is connected to Israel’s long-term vision of how it intends to live with millions of Palestinians in its midst. It is part of a broader strategic goal: the creation of a “Greater Israel.” Specifically, Israel’s leaders remain determined to control all of what used to be known as Mandate Palestine, which includes Gaza and the West Bank. The Palestinians would have limited autonomy in a handful of disconnected and economically crippled enclaves, one of which is Gaza. Israel would control the borders around them, movement between them, the air above and the water below them.
The key to achieving this is to inflict massive pain on the Palestinians so that they come to accept the fact that they are a defeated people and that Israel will be largely responsible for controlling their future. This strategy, which was first articulated by Ze’ev Jabotinsky in the 1920s and has heavily influenced Israeli policy since 1948, is commonly referred to as the “Iron Wall.”

What has been happening in Gaza is fully consistent with this strategy.
Let’s begin with Israel’s decision to withdraw from Gaza in 2005. The conventional wisdom is that Israel was serious about making peace with the Palestinians and that its leaders hoped the exit from Gaza would be a major step toward creating a viable Palestinian state. According to the New York Times’ Thomas L. Friedman, Israel was giving the Palestinians an opportunity to “build a decent mini-state there—a Dubai on the Mediterranean,” and if they did so, it would “fundamentally reshape the Israeli debate about whether the Palestinians can be handed most of the West Bank.”

This is pure fiction. Even before Hamas came to power, the Israelis intended to create an open-air prison for the Palestinians in Gaza and inflict great pain on them until they complied with Israel’s wishes. Dov Weisglass, Ariel Sharon’s closest adviser at the time, candidly stated that the disengagement from Gaza was aimed at halting the peace process, not encouraging it. He described the disengagement as “formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” Moreover, he emphasized that the withdrawal “places the Palestinians under tremendous pressure. It forces them into a corner where they hate to be.”

Arnon Soffer, a prominent Israeli demographer who also advised Sharon, elaborated on what that pressure would look like. “When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”

In January 2006, five months after the Israelis pulled their settlers out of Gaza, Hamas won a decisive victory over Fatah in the Palestinian legislative elections. This meant trouble for Israel’s strategy because Hamas was democratically elected, well organized, not corrupt like Fatah, and unwilling to accept Israel’s existence. Israel responded by ratcheting up economic pressure on the Palestinians, but it did not work. In fact, the situation took another turn for the worse in March 2007, when Fatah and Hamas came together to form a national unity government. Hamas’s stature and political power were growing, and Israel’s divide-and-conquer strategy was unraveling.

To make matters worse, the national unity government began pushing for a long-term ceasefire. The Palestinians would end all missile attacks on Israel if the Israelis would stop arresting and assassinating Palestinians and end their economic stranglehold, opening the border crossings into Gaza.
Israel rejected that offer and with American backing set out to foment a civil war between Fatah and Hamas that would wreck the national unity government and put Fatah in charge. The plan backfired when Hamas drove Fatah out of Gaza, leaving Hamas in charge there and the more pliant Fatah in control of the West Bank. Israel then tightened the screws on the blockade around Gaza, causing even greater hardship and suffering among the Palestinians living there.

Hamas responded by continuing to fire rockets and mortars into Israel, while emphasizing that they still sought a long-term ceasefire, perhaps lasting ten years or more. This was not a noble gesture on Hamas’s part: they sought a ceasefire because the balance of power heavily favored Israel. The Israelis had no interest in a ceasefire and merely intensified the economic pressure on Gaza. But in the late spring of 2008, pressure from Israelis living under the rocket attacks led the government to agree to a six-month ceasefire starting on June 19. That agreement, which formally ended on Dec. 19, immediately preceded the present war, which began on Dec. 27.

The official Israeli position blames Hamas for undermining the ceasefire. This view is widely accepted in the United States, but it is not true. Israeli leaders disliked the ceasefire from the start, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the IDF to begin preparing for the present war while the ceasefire was being negotiated in June 2008. Furthermore, Dan Gillerman, Israel’s former ambassador to the UN, reports that Jerusalem began to prepare the propaganda campaign to sell the present war months before the conflict began. For its part, Hamas drastically reduced the number of missile attacks during the first five months of the ceasefire. A total of two rockets were fired into Israel during September and October, none by Hamas.

How did Israel behave during this same period? It continued arresting and assassinating Palestinians on the West Bank, and it continued the deadly blockade that was slowly strangling Gaza. Then on Nov. 4, as Americans voted for a new president, Israel attacked a tunnel inside Gaza and killed six Palestinians. It was the first major violation of the ceasefire, and the Palestinians—who had been “careful to maintain the ceasefire,” according to Israel’s Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center—responded by resuming rocket attacks. The calm that had prevailed since June vanished as Israel ratcheted up the blockade and its attacks into Gaza and the Palestinians hurled more rockets at Israel. It is worth noting that not a single Israeli was killed by Palestinian missiles between Nov. 4 and the launching of the war on Dec. 27.

As the violence increased, Hamas made clear that it had no interest in extending the ceasefire beyond Dec. 19, which is hardly surprising, since it had not worked as intended. In mid-December, however, Hamas informed Israel that it was still willing to negotiate a long-term ceasefire if it included an end to the arrests and assassinations as well as the lifting of the blockade. But the Israelis, having used the ceasefire to prepare for war against Hamas, rejected this overture. The bombing of Gaza commenced eight days after the failed ceasefire formally ended.

If Israel wanted to stop missile attacks from Gaza, it could have done so by arranging a long-term ceasefire with Hamas. And if Israel were genuinely interested in creating a viable Palestinian state, it could have worked with the national unity government to implement a meaningful ceasefire and change Hamas’s thinking about a two-state solution. But Israel has a different agenda: it is determined to employ the Iron Wall strategy to get the Palestinians in Gaza to accept their fate as hapless subjects of a Greater Israel.

This brutal policy is clearly reflected in Israel’s conduct of the Gaza War. Israel and its supporters claim that the IDF is going to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, in some cases taking risks that put Israeli soldiers in jeopardy. Hardly. One reason to doubt these claims is that Israel refuses to allow reporters into the war zone: it does not want the world to see what its soldiers and bombs are doing inside Gaza. At the same time, Israel has launched a massive propaganda campaign to put a positive spin on the horror stories that do emerge.

The best evidence, however, that Israel is deliberately seeking to punish the broader population in Gaza is the death and destruction the IDF has wrought on that small piece of real estate. Israel has killed over 1,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 4,000. Over half of the casualties are civilians, and many are children. The IDF’s opening salvo on Dec. 27 took place as children were leaving school, and one of its primary targets that day was a large group of graduating police cadets, who hardly qualified as terrorists. In what Ehud Barak called “an all-out war against Hamas,” Israel has targeted a university, schools, mosques, homes, apartment buildings, government offices, and even ambulances. A senior Israeli military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, explained the logic behind Israel’s expansive target set: “There are many aspects of Hamas, and we are trying to hit the whole spectrum, because everything is connected and everything supports terrorism against Israel.” In other words, everyone is a terrorist and everything is a legitimate target.

Israelis tend to be blunt, and they occasionally say what they are really doing. After the IDF killed 40 Palestinian civilians in a UN school on Jan. 6, Ha’aretz reported that “senior officers admit that the IDF has been using enormous firepower.” One officer explained, “For us, being cautious means being aggressive. From the minute we entered, we’ve acted like we’re at war. That creates enormous damage on the ground … I just hope those who have fled the area of Gaza City in which we are operating will describe the shock.”

One might accept that Israel is waging “a cruel, all-out war against 1.5 million Palestinian civilians,” as Ha’aretz put it in an editorial, but argue that it will eventually achieve its war aims and the rest of the world will quickly forget the horrors inflicted on the people of Gaza.

This is wishful thinking. For starters, Israel is unlikely to stop the rocket fire for any appreciable period of time unless it agrees to open Gaza’s borders and stop arresting and killing Palestinians. Israelis talk about cutting off the supply of rockets and mortars into Gaza, but weapons will continue to come in via secret tunnels and ships that sneak through Israel’s naval blockade. It will also be impossible to police all of the goods sent into Gaza through legitimate channels.

Israel could try to conquer all of Gaza and lock the place down. That would probably stop the rocket attacks if Israel deployed a large enough force. But then the IDF would be bogged down in a costly occupation against a deeply hostile population. They would eventually have to leave, and the rocket fire would resume. And if Israel fails to stop the rocket fire and keep it stopped, as seems likely, its deterrent will be diminished, not strengthened.

More importantly, there is little reason to think that the Israelis can beat Hamas into submission and get the Palestinians to live quietly in a handful of Bantustans inside Greater Israel. Israel has been humiliating, torturing, and killing Palestinians in the Occupied Territories since 1967 and has not come close to cowing them. Indeed, Hamas’s reaction to Israel’s brutality seems to lend credence to Nietzsche’s remark that what does not kill you makes you stronger.

But even if the unexpected happens and the Palestinians cave, Israel would still lose because it will become an apartheid state. As Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently said, Israel will “face a South African-style struggle” if the Palestinians do not get a viable state of their own. “As soon as that happens,” he argued, “the state of Israel is finished.” Yet Olmert has done nothing to stop settlement expansion and create a viable Palestinian state, relying instead on the Iron Wall strategy to deal with the Palestinians.
There is also little chance that people around the world who follow the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will soon forget the appalling punishment that Israel is meting out in Gaza. The destruction is just too obvious to miss, and too many people—especially in the Arab and Islamic world—care about the Palestinians’ fate. Moreover, discourse about this longstanding conflict has undergone a sea change in the West in recent years, and many of us who were once wholly sympathetic to Israel now see that the Israelis are the victimizers and the Palestinians are the victims. What is happening in Gaza will accelerate that changing picture of the conflict and long be seen as a dark stain on Israel’s reputation.

The bottom line is that no matter what happens on the battlefield, Israel cannot win its war in Gaza. In fact, it is pursuing a strategy—with lots of help from its so-called friends in the Diaspora—that is placing its long-term future at risk.

Why Are Jews Persecuted?

Commentary
By Jayne Gardener


I always used to wonder what it was about Jews that made people throughout history despise them.

If they were indeed “God’s chosen” I thought, they had to be the unluckiest people in the history of the world.

Why were they persecuted throughout history?

Why had the Nazis herded them into cattle cars and taken them to “extermination camps” to dispose once and for all of the “Jewish problem?”
I suddenly recognized that if Hitler had developed a “Final Solution” to the Jewish question, that there had to have been a “Jewish Problem.” Could the Jews have in any way behaved in such a manner that would make the countries in which they resided turn against them, or were they just unfortunate, innocent victims?

I set out to find answers for my questions, mainly turning to the Internet, but also reading various books on the subject. What I found became increasingly disturbing to me.

I had not known that throughout history, the Jews had been expelled from 79 countries, some countries more than once.

I had not known that many of the claims they made about the Holocaust that I had believed unquestioningly for so long were in fact fraudulent.
The books I had read and the movies I had seen about the “Holocaust” and wept over were nothing but thinly veiled attempts to garner unwavering sympathy for the state of Israel and an excuse to extort billions of dollars from Germany and 1.25 billion dollars from the Swiss banks.

I discovered that a book I had read many times as a teenager and cried about, Anne Frank’s Diary, had been at least partially written by someone other than Anne Frank.

I learned that the confessions at the Nuremburg Trials and the executions of so many German “war criminals” were were extracted under torture and the defendants were being tried, judged and condemned by their very accusers.

I learned about the “false flag” operations, especially the Lavon affair and the tragedy of the USS Liberty, an American ship that was attacked by the Israelis during the 1967 war. 34 young American men were killed and many more wounded.

To add insult to injury, the Israelis claimed that it was simply an unfortunate case of mistaken identity, something the survivors of the Liberty have always vehemently denied. They, however, were threatened with court martial if they were ever to tell their stories.

I learned about the Jonathan Pollard spy case and other incidents of Israeli Jews spying against their supposed “closest ally.”


I became shocked and horrified as I learned about the treatment of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories at the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces and the Jewish settlers. Israel purports to be the only democracy in the middle east, but it’s only a democracy for Jews. Non-Jews are not considered equal.

I was saddened to see pictures of innocent Palestinian children burned beyond recognition or suffering from serious gunshot wounds after being targeted by the IDF for no other reason than that they are Palestinian.
I found out about the Jewish history of avariciousness, larceny, lying, manipulation and their questionable and usurious business practices.
I learned about their roles in the radical homosexual movement, the radical feminist movement, the pornography industry as well as their over-representation in the abortion industry.

I discovered their role in organized crime, in the slave trade, in the civil rights movement and in Communism, an ideology that is responsible for the deaths of untold millions and the repression of many millions more.
I learned that it was Jewish supremacists behind the war against Christianity and Christmas. It is they who want God out of the Pledge of Allegiance and all symbols of Christianity removed from public life.
They have driven Christianity from the public schools despite Christianity being the majority religion.

They have taken Christmas out of the public school calendar despite the fact that it is a statutory holiday and it is named Christmas.
I read about the anti-Gentilism and hatefulness of the Babylonian Talmud and their utter disrespect for, and hostility towards Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary and Christianity and Christians in general.

I learned about their “chutzpah” in claiming that Gentile lives were worth no more than the lives of barnyard animals but that they considered Jewish lives to be akin to God Himself. It’s okay to steal from a Gentile or to kill a Gentile, but Jewish lives are sacred.

I learned of their control of the majority of wealth, the media and academia despite them making up less than 3% of the population (even lower in Canada).

They are behind the ridiculous political correctness movement and hate crime legislation that was drafted so as to silence anyone who might figure out their agenda and attempt to shed light on it.

Men like German Rudolf, David Irving and many more, previously recognized as great historians, were arrested, charged with hate crimes and incarcerated simply for having made academic inquiry into a specific period of history.

Other so called “revisionists” or “holocaust deniers” have been intimidated, harassed, assaulted and smeared simply for trying to get at the truth.
I found out that the Jews are responsible for our wide open immigration policies that have created the nightmare we call “multiculturalism,” “diversity,” inclusiveness” and “pluralism.”

It is mostly they who push for race mixing and miscegenation, knowing full well that it would eventually lead to those of white European descent being minorities in their own countries and the eventual extermination of white European DNA.

It is patently clear that the war in Iraq is due solely to Israel wanting to hobble her enemies by destabilizing their governments in order to achieve hegemony in the middle east.


It would be unthinkable for Israeli Jews to die for this cause, so they manipulated the US into the war with the help of the Jewish Zionist “Israel firsters” in the Bush administration in order that the blood of way too many young American men and women is shed instead.

It is they who control the middle eastern foreign policy of the most powerful country in the world, the USA. It is they who control congress, the senate and the puppet president, George W. Bush.

They have such control in movies and television that we are now subjected to endless programs and Hollywood movies that mock Christianity, Christian values and degrade the traditional family.

After sober reflection on what I had discovered about Jewish supremacy and Zionism, I had to abandon all my previously held notions as to the history of Jewish persecution.

What I have trouble understanding is why they continue this behavior in whichever society they live, knowing that eventually they will overplay their hand and their perfidy will be exposed yet again. Has history taught them nothing?

As more and more people become aware of what is going on and who is responsible for it, anger is going to rise as it already has in the former Soviet Union and eastern European countries.

They may control television, movies and the print media, but they don’t control the internet. At least not yet. Blogs and websites devoted to “outing” the Jewish supremacists will ultimately be their downfall.
If everyone who sees this information passes it on to at least one other person, the crimes and misdeeds of the Jewish supremacists and Zionists will be exposed. Please, do your part. Pass it on. Our world as we know it is counting on you.


Source Document

Wow, that's a lot of text. For what it's worth, next time you get the itch to post something like this, you can save us all a bunch of time by simply saying "I am a paranoid bigot". Those five little words would cut to the chase without omitting any details worth mentioning.

No need to thank me; I'm just here to help.

More cut and paste garbage from troll number 3.

I just love the little scroll button on my mouse, it goes down down down, ignore ignore ignore...



Knight

To be honest nothing is new to me as am well-read.

Most academic people are already knew the reason of using the phrase, “happy holiday: in the Media in the US instead of Merry Christmas, even though as you said the majority of people in America are Christian is because of the Zionist influences within the US decision makers.

Most academic people already knew that Jacob Ezra Merkin is one of the key Zionist players in the Madoff $50 billion fraud, the latest chapter of the $2 Trillion Zionist Rip-Off. His Israeli-American family is one of the founding families of Israel.

Bernard Madoff got arrested for stolen $50 billions from hard working American families, retirees and likewise folks from around the world, was the national treasurer of the American Jewish Congress and Yeshiva University. His business partner at Yeshiva was Sy Syms, the long-standing director of the notorious Israel Discount Bank of New York, a bank charged for laundering tens of billions of dollars in 2005. So where did the $50 billion go? The evidence suggests that a large amount of money went to the Zionist criminal network headed by Ehud Olmert and his cronies.

Most academic people already knew that Israeli’s lobbyists have got the Congress under control that every American president has to make the allegiance to Israel before taken the Oval Office. Even Obama did that too.

Most academic people already knew that the majority of the Media in the West are controlled by the Zionist.

But who don’t know are, the ordinary people in the West who mainly see the world through what they hear, read, and watch in the Media. They go and vote, and then unwittingly pay no attention to what are the agenda behind their countries’ foreign policies.

Humbleman wrote:To be honest nothing is new to me as am well-read.

Most academic people are already knew the reason of using the phrase, “happy holiday: in the Media in the US instead of Merry Christmas, even though as you said the majority of people in America are Christian is because of the Zionist influences within the US decision makers.

Baloney. In a society predicated on the separation of church and state, "Merry Christmas" is a fine greeting among friends and family, but a tacky one in public venues. Besides which, Christmas hasn't been a major holiday for much more than a century. That's it. That's the whole story right there.

The rest of your post is a jumble of fevered, desperately bigoted verbal diarrhea, and I won't stoop to address it piecemeal.

You need to consult better "academic people".

Sincerely,

An Academic Person.

Kullervo, I am afraid I have to disagree with you.

My friend my suggestion is this, go and do some neutral research and I guarantee you’ll find most of the above are true.

Are you denying that pro-Zionist lobbyists don’t exist in the US congress?

And in regard to Bernard Madoff, please tell us who is he, what his religion is and what his crime is. Go on

I respect your views regardless, but the truth is the truth. I never have hated the real Jewish people nor never will, I just like the truth to be heard.

Peace.

Chocoholic wrote:More cut and paste garbage from troll number 3.

so its for real I'm # 2 ?

yesssssssssssss I love getting a titel, what dose troll means anyway ?

Humbleman wrote:Kullervo, I am afraid I have to disagree with you.

My friend my suggestion is this, go and do some neutral research and I guarantee you’ll find most of the above are true.

Are you denying that pro-Zionist lobbyists don’t exist in the US congress?

And in regard to Bernard Madoff, please tell us who is he, what his religion is and what his crime is. Go on

I respect your views regardless, but the truth is the truth. I never have hated the real Jewish people nor never will, I just like the truth to be heard.

Peace.

Humbleman:

With a few brief interludes, I have lived in the States for all my 40 years. I've lived through the sea change to "Happy Holidays" that seems such an ominous development to you, and I know that it had nothing to do with religious influences of any kind: it had to do with a general disinclination to make non-celebrators of Christmas (a group that includes many Christians) feel uncomfortable. Is that a silly concern? Maybe. But it's absolutely not a matter of private businesses (who are the ones responsible here) caving in to some sort of cabal.

There isn't a group of more than two people that doesn't have a lobby in Washington. So yes, there are pro-Zionists in Washington. And anti-Zionists. And a whole lot of morons in the White House, who'll be gone in a few hours. That's something we can all celebrate.

I know that Madoff was something of a maverick, involved with NASDAQ instead of the far-more-vital NYSE, and that he's one of scores of big shots in the financial world who've run ponzi schemes. He's a bad guy, but he's got a lot of company, from across the religious spectrum. I don't know about his specific religious views, and neither do you.

Your suggestion that Barack Obama somehow pledged allegiance to Israel, or to any foreign country, is ing. In the States, those would be considered fighting words; here, I'll simply ask you to provide evidence--real evidence--to support your assertion, which stands for now as a clumsy libel. Thank you.

uaekid wrote:

Chocoholic wrote:More cut and paste garbage from troll number 3.

so its for real I'm # 2 ?

yesssssssssssss I love getting a titel, what dose troll means anyway ?

Uaekid. Troll is derived from Scandinavian stories, which refer to a creature that looks like an ugly person, which can be large and evil or a small and friendly.

You see, people who are incapable of giving and take an opinion in civilised manner are more likely to resort to childish language.

that's a good comment humbleman and it's true.

Kullervo, cheers for the quick reply.

Look, don’t get me wrong, I believe that the United State of America is the greatest country in the world in term of equal opportunity and internal policy. However, I think its major downfall has been its foreign policy, and especially its unconditional support to Israel’s government at the expense of starving and powerless Palestinians.

I do know that Bernard Madoff is from a Jew descent, everybody knows that.

In regard to Obama, remember in the campaign how many times he said American will defend Israel regardless. Remember his visit to Israel, and using his two daughters as an example to demonstrate and justify Israeli’s agenda against Hamas’ homemade rockets.

No intent to offend you or any American as I know most of Americans are decent folks whom have nothing to do with US foreign policy. However, these are facts.


I am optimistic as you are to a better America; I genuinely want to see the real America back on the international stage as an honest broker, as a voice of the voiceless. That’s the America that I love

Humbleman wrote:Kullervo, cheers for the quick reply.

Look, don’t get me wrong, I believe that the United State of America is the greatest country in the world in term of equal opportunity and internal policy. However, I think its major downfall has been its foreign policy, and especially its unconditional support to Israel’s government at the expense of starving and powerless Palestinians.

I do know that Bernard Madoff is from a Jew descent, everybody knows that.

In regard to Obama, remember in the campaign how many times he said American will defend Israel regardless. Remember his visit to Israel, and using his two daughters as an example to demonstrate and justify Israeli’s agenda against Hamas’ homemade rockets.

No intent to offend you or any American as I know most of Americans are decent folks whom have nothing to do with US foreign policy. However, these are facts.


I am optimistic as you are to a better America; I genuinely want to see the real America back on the international stage as an honest broker, as a voice of the voiceless. That’s the America that I love

Thanks, Humbleman, for your equally quick, generous and temperate reply.

Obama's very words at Sderot were these (quoted in the Washington Post, 28 December 2008):

"If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that," Obama said at the time. "And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."

He didn't say that he personally would "defend Israel regardless"; he simply empathized with people who'd been hit by rockets and said, quite reasonably, that he'd expect them to do what's in their power to stop the attacks. And that's where he left it. He was careful not to get into detailed foreign policy statements, during the course of which he might well have pointed out that massive military occupations aren't the answer.

If that's your evidence for his having pledged allegiance to Israel, I respectfully submit that you're flat-out wrong.

Heck, for every similar piece of jumped-up "evidence" you care to mention, I can show you two claiming that Obama is a devout Muslim. Accept all of those claims, and it's a fascinating little picture. Reject them all, the picture's more mundane...but at least it's true.

kullervo............ u don't seem to have knowledge of history.

"If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that," Obama said at the time. "And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."

when did it become "my house" ?!

do u really think israelis did the same ?! killing 1300 people in which majority are innocent civilians and half of them are women and children against sending 80 rockets is what you consider "doing the same thing" ?!

gafoorgk wrote:kullervo............ u don't seem to have knowledge of history.

"If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that," Obama said at the time. "And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."

when did it become "my house" ?!

do u really think israelis did the same ?! killing 1300 people in which majority are innocent civilians and half of them are women and children against sending 80 rockets is what you consider "doing the same thing" ?!

History doesn't enter into it, and "my house" was a simple metaphor. "If someone attacks my family, I'll do everything in my power to stop that". I hope that we can both agree that that's a reasonable statement, regardless of where one lives.

The broader question, which Obama was careful not to discuss, is whether a massive military invasion represents "everything in my power to stop that". Such military action clearly hasn't stopped the hostilities or brought peace to the region.

So we're left with two possibilities:

1. Military hostility really is all either side can do. In this case, all hope is lost, and none of us should give a tinker's cuss about *either* side.

2. Military hostility is not the full measure of everything Palestine and Israel can do to resolve the conflict. This is what I believe, and everything he's said and done suggests to me that it's what Obama believes.

kullervo wrote:Wow, that's a lot of text. For what it's worth, next time you get the itch to post something like this, you can save us all a bunch of time by simply saying "I am a paranoid bigot". Those five little words would cut to the chase without omitting any details worth mentioning.

No need to thank me; I'm just here to help.

I didn't know you are a paranoid bigot but now I do.
I also know you don't like reading specially if truth is involved somewhere in that article.

Humbleman wrote:Kullervo, cheers for the quick reply.

Look, don’t get me wrong, I believe that the United State of America is the greatest country in the world in term of equal opportunity and internal policy. However, I think its major downfall has been its foreign policy, and especially its unconditional support to Israel’s government at the expense of starving and powerless Palestinians.

Brother I am extremely disappointed with your useless pro-western tripe.

Is that why USA has less than 2% Muslim population, but Muslims are arrested, deported, jailed or imprisoned due to their religion in USA?

Is that why USA had killed more than millions of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan and Plaestine?

Let's face it, all you want (and ppl of your ilk) is to avoid taking responsibility. You wish somebody else will do your work for you (collectively speaking). You wish USA would stop favouring Zionists and start favouring Arabs.

Why are you so afraid of USA? Or Westerners? Why? I am stunned!

I have been saying, we need more than a few hundred nuclear tipped ICBMs targetted at major population centres of USA as the minimum deterrent, if a combined miltiary bloc achieves this reality we can have some peace.

I am optimistic as you are to a better America; I genuinely want to see the real America back on the international stage as an honest broker, as a voice of the voiceless. That’s the America that I love

Useless talk. You are a foreigner, one out of 6 billion who want USA to act according to its wish. Should USA listen to all foreigners? Would it? No.

Taking responsibility for own future is the way to go.

Unfortunately in Bangladesh a lot of people are uneducated and stupid, this led to 'secularism' and consequently pro anglo american alignment which hasn't helped us. The mainstay of our exports industry is garments sector because of secularism we haven't been able to develop further and because of dependence on Western markets to a large extent, there were fears we may face economic downturn.

Thankfully millions of hardworking and truth and justice loving Bangladeshis went to our brotherly countries. As a result, Arabs are the largest source of foreign exchange for Bangladesh. Most of our remittances come from our brotherly countries.

That's why thankfully we should be able to avoid the fallout from the Western economic collapse, Inshallah.

I hope all our Arab and other brotherly people would also learn to divest themselves from Western hypocrisy and such similar economic systems.

"If someone attacks my family, I'll do everything in my power to stop that"

kullervo, this "my family" attacked those families who make attacks now long before and took their houses. now ask the questions you raised to yourself. if u can find answers, those will lead to many other answers as well.

history should enter in my pov kullervo for a simple reason that you cannot just come and take what is mine and say this is where judgment begins.