• 🇬🇧󠁿 🇸🇪 🇿🇦 🇮🇪 🇬🇭 🇩🇪 🇪🇺
    European & African
    Drug Discussion

    Welcome Guest!
    Posting Rules Bluelight Rules
  • EADD Moderators: Shambles

Bloodshed in Gaza: "It's a hell of a pinpoint operation"

Sammy G said:
Exactly. And it could have been avoided had Israel not opposed the PLO / Hamas reconciliation government that was formed in June. A government which (ironically) is far more moderate and less likely to endorse tunnels and rocket attacks than the previous Hamas-dominated administration.

But hey - three students kidnapped and murdered? Let's go and 'mow the lawn' again. :|
Click to expand...

This is exactly why Israel is "mowing the lawn", the union of long disparate Palestinian groups makes them alot stronger diplomatically, a perfect time to flex her muscles & of course it draw huge attention towards the war, & away from the failed peace talks.
 
Sammy G said:
It's nothing to do with religion. Religion is merely a tool used to aggravate the conflict and rally supporters to the cause.

Do you think Northern Ireland was a religious conflict? It wasn't. Not until the British occupiers realised its potency as a force for polarisation.
Click to expand...
I'm not so mired in miraculist thinking as to suppose the problem would go away instantaneously if religion was abolished. However, it is acting as a powerful aggravating factor all around.

To the actual combatants in the Middle East -- and to the USA, where people who ought to know better seem literally to believe that the Bible trumps reality (*) -- religion engenders a false sense of righteousness; the idea that some outcome is pre-ordained and inevitable and an omnipotent God is on their side. If you catch a person at the right age -- just when they are discovering how overwhelming the world can be -- it's very easy to persuade them that they don't have to think for themselves; just switch your brain off, do exactly what it says in this dusty old book, and everything will work out wonderful for you. Promise someone who hasn't yet been properly close to death that they are due a posthumous reward, and you can even negate the usual human self-preservation instinct which ordinarily pulls people up short. And even in the largely secular (except the USA) West, religion adds a dimension of uncriticisability -- if you say anything bad about Israel, you risk being called anti-Semitic, while if you say anything bad about the Palestinians, you risk being called Islamophobic.

You can't say that doesn't at least make it harder to pick apart the threads.

(*) There are people in the USA who literally believe that the Earth was created over the course of 168 hours, about 6000 years ago; and that once the Temple is rebuilt in Jerusalem, that will bring about Armageddon, ending up with the Rapture and the Kingdom of Heaven. And they actually want this to happen. It would be bad enough for someone like that to have the vote; but these are people in actual positions of real power.
 
I've never once encountered somebody who's been accused of Islamophobia for criticising Palestinian actions. I've witnessed people being accused of Zionism for doing so, sure, and sometimes unfairly. That's discounting Christian Zionists, guilt-ridden vague pro-Israelis and straightforward white racist EDL types, btw.

I don't deny that it's a huge factor in this situation, and I know all too well about US religious barmpots in (quite frightening) positions of power.

I just think that overemphasising the religious aspect is one of the ways in which the western imperialist propaganda machine tries to characterise this as some ancient Semitic inter-ethnic, inter-religious tribal hoo-haa, thereby minimising it in an already-puzzled public's mind, and thus masking the very real western political and military interests.
 
Israel / Gaza's sky at night. No, that's not some freakish astronomical phenomenon:

BtPyQ3CCYAEk1S2.jpg


https://twitter.com/Astro_Alex/status/492003157531451392/photo/1
 
Last edited:
can someone explain whats the big deal about that photo ?

what you're looking at is lots of lightbulbs. Anyone recognize this place ?

london-from-iss-by-chris-hadfield-5feb2013.jpg
 
^ Is that comment addressed at me ? Or the people wetting them selves over the gaza pic ?

If it is addressed at me i'd say that neither photo shows rockets, there are some roads though
 
Sammy G said:
...I just think that overemphasising the religious aspect is one of the ways in which the western imperialist propaganda machine tries to characterise this as some ancient Semitic inter-ethnic, inter-religious tribal hoo-haa, thereby minimising it in an already-puzzled public's mind, and thus masking the very real western political and military interests.
Click to expand...

I agree. I refer back to the document linked in post #33 for the real root cause of the palestine problem (ie imperialism) - Religion in this case was always a tool used to manipulate people for imperial ends. While people's religious idiocy does render them more liable to be manipulated, which is bad, it's the manipulators that are the ultimate source of the problem, and at the top level they are very likely non-religious (or they'd think meta-religious). (similarly you can't fully blame israel in isolation as they exist as they do for 'our' purposes)

I also see as many non-religious idea complexes which end up in violence in the world (eg capitalism, stalinism, neoconservatism, neoliberalism) - arguably much more violence overall. I don't like any moronic ideas which allow someone to dehumanise inconvenient people, whether they're religious, or self-serving economic, imperial, philosophical ideas. Any idea complex can probably be twisted to be a substrate for human cuntishness (or for human niceness) - i wouldn't isolate religious ones in this regard. The cuntishness comes first - the ideas are adopted and modified to fit, often unconsciously.

What excuse do we use for the idiocy of the people of britain for example, which facilitate by ignorance many deplorable imperialist economic or military adventures around the world? (eg iraq, chagos island, mau mau, malaysian concentration camps, city of london-generated financial crash etc)
 
Last edited:
The excellent Felicity Arbuthnot:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article39201.htm

“You take my water
Burn my olive trees
Destroy my house
Take my job
Steal my land
Imprison my father
Kill my mother
Bomb my country
Starve us all
Humiliate us all
But … I am to blame: I shot a rocket back.”

(Placard first seen in Gaza, 2012.)

July 23, 2014 "ICH" - The “most moral army in the world” from “the only democracy in the Middle East” has attacked hospitals, a home for the disabled, a geriatric hospice, demolished five mosques, razed entire neighbourhoods, erased entire families – the youngest – so far – just three days old if you do not count the unborn, as in the case of twenty nine year old Samar Al Hallaq (1) killed with her two sons, aged four and five, other members of her family and carrying her third child. Her husband was critically injured...
Click to expand...

Open letter from doctors in the lancet:

http://www.thelancet.com/gaza-letter-2014

"We are doctors and scientists, who spend our lives developing means to care and protect health and lives. We are also informed people; we teach the ethics of our professions, together with the knowledge and practice of it. We all have worked in and known the situation of Gaza for years.

On the basis of our ethics and practice, we are denouncing what we witness in the aggression of Gaza by Israel...
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top