Originally posted by: Red Dawn
Originally posted by: Craig234
This is sickening. To their credit, they at least have an investigative process we can only hope has soime honesty and does some good.
Unfortunately, the side here that almost undconditionally backs Israel will probably be mostly unaffected by the facts, continuing their demonization of Palestinians to justify it.
I'm not Pro Israel but wtf, how about Hamas, are they going to open up an investigation regarding their fighters killing innocent Israeli civilians? Also what's your opinion about all the innocent Palestinian civilians Hamas murdered in their power grab?
1. Read the second sentence in my post. The one that begins "To their credit....". That already made the same point you did about the fact the Palestinian side has issues too, that they don't even have the same sort of standards for dealing with the wrongs - as a resistance movement more than a government comparable to Israel (see later comments), it's to Israel's credit that they at least have some standards that this is wrong, and can possibly take corrective action - that needs ot be strengthened, though.
I've seen the usual propagandistic 'bad apple' posts - when they do it, their whole side is accountable, but when our side does it, it's 'bad apples', even if it was policy.
2. How many Israeli civilians has Hamas killed, and how many Palastenian civilians has Israel killed? Isn't it something like 'under 5' versus 'nearly 1000' the last couple years?
3. Which side are we more responsible for - who are we giving billions in military aid to every year? Only one side that we are responsible for.
4. Remember, Hamas was created with Israel's help, as they used the age old 'divide and conquer' approach to try to create a split among Palestinians to weaken the PLO.
It's not at all uncommon for a group in the situation of the Palestenians to get competig groups murdering one another. It's tragic, but how are you going to avoid it, when you have the pressures of things like the varying approaches to how to deal with the oppression from Israel, the people who will compromise more and those who will compromise less, each wanting to lead? The tensions are shown by how the people turned to Hamas when they felt Fatah was terribly corrupted and ineffective.
I think it's terrible how Hamas has murdered. You might imagine though there are huge pressures going on with the competition for power. COnsider how they have dealt with informers who cooperate with Israel over the years, since Israel is constantly working to create spies among the Palestinians, who among other things identify leadership for Israel to assassinate. It's a bloody, messy, tragic situation.
You can find in many political struggles violent periodds between competing groups. Even in our own Revolutionary war, there were Americans on both sides of the war.
It's not really framing the issue very accurately to try to treat it like two sides in a war, as if it's two states, when the sides are so hugely unequal in power.
It's more like a resistance movement with a semi-occupier who wants to be free of the occupation.
Remember how North Vietnamese were terrorists for using terrorism to remove the US's puppet regime in 'South Vietnam' - but how we conveniently forgot the history that South Vietnam itself was our creation to 'steal' half of Vietnam, so it's ok when we do it using our political and military strngth - the history of how we had happily supported the occupation of Vietnam by France for decades - even the fact that we were training terrorists and sending them into North Vietnam? But that wasn't how we saw the conflict, was it?
It reminds me a little of our 'outrage' over the Indians killing Custer's unit - forgetting why they were there, to massacre the Indians. Amazing how blinding bias can be.
As a rsistance movement, the Palestinians are better compared with the African National Congress in South Africa during the apartheid era, who were 'violent terrorists'; better compared with the Algerian resistance who murdered the French occupiers, including the family members there of the French occupation. Have you ever seen or read 'The Batle of Algiers'? It's a tragic, violent situation - and all too easy to be blinded by bias, hating the violence of the resistance while forgetting the injustices by the dominant power, but not noting that the only way that these unjust power situations seem to get changed is through the use of violent resistance. Even in the US, on a much smaller scale, it was the black riots of the late 1960's that got the attention of the nation's white government to form a national commission on the race issues, because the riots were intolerable, even as the whites condemned the lack of 'law and order', and belatedly embraced Martin Luther King's 'non-violent' approach, after years of the FBI trying to destroy and even kill him.
You could condemn every person killed by the ANC, by North Vietnam, by the Algerian resistance, by the FMLN in El Salvador, by the Palestinians - but how then do you suggest the larger injustes get addressed of the white Apartheid regime, the colonization of Vietnam, the colonization of Algeria, the setting up of a brutal puppet regime in El Salvador with death squads?
How are YOU going to non-violently fix the injustices?
The topic in this thread is the inappropriate use of violence by Israel against Palestinian civilians. Why can't that be discussed without the 'ya but' response as if if any wrong by Israel is justified? Why can't you simply say 'yes, Israel was wrong if ths is true, and it's good to see justice being done'? What legitimate interest of Israel was served by the excessive killing of civilians? Are Palestinian lives worth nothing, so that if slaughtering 500 Palestenians saves a few lives in the Israeli forces, it's justified - is that the right way to have policies on the military who is invading/occupying a city? If so, you have justified every brutal occupation that's ever happened.
Did you see American troops slaughtering the civilians of Germay and Japan after WWII 'just to be safe from any resistance'? If you had, how would those occupations have gone? Oh, you might say, those were different - there were large populations in those nations, and it'd have been difficult to deal with the resistance had that happened. So, then, the question isn't the justice, but simply the logistics, that it's ok to slaughter if the power baance makes it work ok?
I said in my post I expected the response to this by some to be not to deal with the issue with Israel, but to just do a 'ya but' responmse demonizing the Palestinians.
I was surprised to see you be one of the people doing that, especially raising an objection I'd already (I thought) implicitly addressed that I'm hardly saying Hamas lacks flaws.
But you can't answer every issue about one side by simply restating the same demonization of the other side, giving unlimited license to one side to do anything.
I await your answer to the bolded question above, to let me know how you can resolve injustices without the use of such violence.
IMO, as a powerful, pribiliged people, we have some bias for 'authority' and against 'resistance', because we have not much had to be in the shoes of the occupied.