This is a threat?  We set off larger at our rocket club when I was a kid! (NRA)

Damn!

Dmtdust wrote:

This is a threat?  We set off larger at our rocket club when I was a kid! (NRA)

Don't be silly, if it was your backyard those rockets landed in you wouldn't be happy. 

Look - if you approach this as a modern "fairness" ideal then you must side with the palestinians and we must re-locate the Jews.  But then we must do the same for all "nations" conquered in recorded history; ergo - we forfeit our personal holdings.  You cannot sit there and choose a specific time-line before which we will not change; that is completely hypocritical.

Pack your shit and join the Israelis in their search for a new home.

Well, you can't correct the deep past, but this one is doable.  I say we give the Israeli's NYC.

Done.

Beverly and Malibu also


at a certain point we must insist enough - perhaps we should start launching frog's from Long Beach.


(FROG=Free Rocket over Ground)

Last edited by Emmeran (2009-01-07 11:49:53)

Jonah Goldberg is a sack of the well known stuff.  He knows how to skirt the issues though, I will give him that.

I liked this response: "8. face it. both sides have engaged in atrocities over the last 60 years. until someone can stop the cycle, it will never stop. real leadership will stop pounding their chest and decide on a mutual solution. i know i am dreaming."

Consequences, schmonsequences

orangeplus wrote:

Consequences, schmonsequences

Oh goody!  An excuse to blow more of them up!

Consequences

Last edited by orangeplus (2009-01-08 01:14:12)

http://www.informationclearinghouse.inf … e21653.htm

Have Bush and the Neocons Ruined it for the Israelis?
By Juan Cole

January 06, 2009 "Information Clearinghouse" - -- The Israeli propaganda blitz
around their attack on Gaza has been greeted with uncharacteristic skepticism by the
American public and even by some of the mainstream US press. Even the Jewish
American community is uneasy about this one, in a way perhaps unparalelled since
the 1982 Israeli attack on Lebanon and siege of Beirut. Jews for Peace in Los Angeles
are actively protesting the Gaza atrocities, and newspaper articles from around the
US on local protests held this weekend often mention mixed Arab-American and
Jewish-American rallies.

If it is true that Americans are greeting Israeli talking points with more criticism this
time, is it because we have been intensively exposed for the past 8 years to precisely
this sort of mental manipulation by Bush-Cheney and their stable of
Neoconservatives?

Let's take some of the basic techniques of propaganda practiced by Bush and
compare them to those deployed by the Israeli leadership in the past 8 days.

1. Deny it all.

Bushie Examples: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld denied that there was
massive looting in Iraq during April of 2003, alleging that CNN had one tape of a guy
stealing a vase and kept looping it over and over again. "How many vases can they
have?" he asked. In mid-summer 2003, Rumsfeld denied that there was a guerrilla
war in Iraq, even though Jamie McIntyre of CNN was able to quote the Pentagon
definition of guerrilla war, and it fit Iraq. Rumsfeld just replied, "No."
Cont'd/

Then there was Bush's insistence that "Brownie" had done a "heckuva job" in New
Orleans after Katrina.

Kadima Examples: When French President Sarkozy requested a two-day halt in Israeli
air strikes so that humanitarian aid could reach ordinary Gazans, Israeli foreign
minister Tzipi Livni replied, "there is no humanitarian crisis in the [Gaza] Strip and
therefore there is no need for a humanitarian truce." The UN and others involved in
humanitarian work in Gaza do not agree:


    ' the UN agency insisted it was desperate to get supplies into the enclave."The
military incursion compounds the humanitarian crisis following more than a week of
shelling and an 18-month long blockade of the territory," the UN humanitarian
coordinatory said in a daily report. There was an "almost total blackout" across most
of Gaza and land and mobile phone networks were also down because they depend
on backup generators which had no fuel, the report said. All Gaza City hospitals have
been without mains electricity for 48 hours and now rely on backup generators which
the UN said were "close to collapse." The report said that "for the second consecutive
day Israeli authorities have refused to allow an ICRC (International Committee of the
Red Cross) emergency medical team into Gaza" to help at the main Shifa hospital.
The territory has been sealed off for more than two days. . . More than 510
Palestinians have already been killed in Israel's nine day old offensive on Hamas
targets in the Gaza Strip, which on Saturday was intensified with the launch of a
massive ground operation. The UN said the tank fire and air attacks were preventing
medical staff reaching hospitals and ambulances could not get to injured "because of
continuous fire." The World Food Programme has coordinated emergency food
deliveries into Gaza in recent months but the Israeli army said there was plenty of
food in Gaza warehouses and that the territory's Hamas rulers had halted
distribution.'



In line with Livni's Big Lie, the Israeli army said with a straight face that the reason
the World Food Program doesn't send food into Gaza is because its warehouses there
are "full."

2. Pretend that your main concern is for your own victims

Bushie examples: They refused to say that they "invaded" or "conquered" Iraq,
always using the word "liberation" when they spoke of their war of aggression. Bush
was not invading and occupying Iraq, he was liberating the long-suffering Iraqis.
Richard Perle even maintained that they would be "grateful" for being "liberated."
I.e., we're doing this to you for your own good.

The Bushies renamed the Iraqi guerrilla resistance to the US "anti-Iraqi forces." They
even managed to get some clueless CNN anchors to report that "anti-Iraqi forces
attacked US troops in the Triangle of Death today." The implication was that the US
military and its allies were the pro-Iraqi forces.

Kadima: Livni said, "But Hamas is not our problem alone; it is also a problem for all
the Palestinians in the region." I.e., Israel is bombing and attacking Gaza on behalf
of the Palestinians to secure their welfare.

3. Demonizing the opponent, ad hominem arguments

Bushies: "Axis of Evil" (courtesy Neocon David Frum). Bush called Saddam a "threat"
even if he had no weapons!. Saddam was intrinsically dangerous, ontologically
dangerous; his danger to the US could not be divorced from his very being in
existence. (How silly this all is is easily demonstrated by the Reagan and first Bush
administration's active alliance with . . . Saddam.)

Israeli pundit: Confronting the depths of Hamas's evil.

Hamas won the elections for the Palestine Authority in January 2006 and formed a
government; yet Livni objects even to speaking of a ceasefire between Israel and
Hamas, because Hamas, she says, is just a terrorist organization. (It has engaged in
terrorist tactics, just as Livni has committed state terror on a large scale, as with
dropping a million cluster bombs on civilian areas of south Lebanon; but Hamas isn't
"just" a terrorist organization, or Livni's bombing of policemen and the ministry of
interior in Gaza would make no sense; she thinks it was the government of Gaza,
obviously. Hamas has engaged in diplomacy, has called truces, etc. It is made up of
human beings, not demons.)

4. Repetition of simple slogans until they become accepted as true

Bushie examples: There are so many I don't know where to start. But the repeated
innuendo that Saddam Hussein was operationally connection to the 9/11 al-Qaeda
attacks on the US is the big example. The assertion that Iraq had "weapons of mass
destruction" (itself a propaganda phrase intended to suggest nukes) was made over
and over again, and Bush, Rice, andothers constantly used "mushroom cloud" and
other nuclear imagery for Iraq.

Kadima: Israeli leaders have repeated over and over again that they "had no choice"
but to attack Gaza. But of course they had a choice. They had negotiated before,
they could have negotiated again. Assertions that the Palestinians walked away from
the 2000 Camp David negotiations, that Israel is involved in a "peace process", that
the colonies in the West Bank can't be moved back to Israel, all of these are
constantly repeated.


5. Use of half-truths

Bushie examples: Bush would boast that 2/3s of the al-Qaeda leadership had been
killed or captured, without mentioning that many in its upper echelons, like, oh,
Osama Bin Laden had not. Or he slammed the Democrats who had voted against his
illegal war of aggression as "not supporting liberation."

Kadima examples: Israelis point to thousands of rocket attacks by Hamas on Israel,
without mentioning that no Israelis had been killed by them during the truce
stretching from mid-June, 2008 until December 26. That is, the prelude to the most
violent Israeli attack on Gaza since 1967 was . . . not a single Israeli death at the
hands of Hamas in the preceding half-year. And in 8 years, Hamas had killed about
15 Israelis with those home made rockets, during which time the Israelis had killed
nearly 5000 Palestinians, nearly 1000 of them minors. The rockets were small,
handmade affairs for the most part and most landed uselessly. Some did damage to
property and a few wounded or killed people. That would be a legitimate assertion.
But the quotation of "thousands" of rockets is a half-truth and intentionally
misleading.

Another half-truth is that Israel is involved in a "peace process" or supports
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, when in fact it has gone on stealing
Palestinian land in the West Bank and making Palestinian lives miserable and
colonizing them.

Then there are other techniques such as 6) appeal to fear and 7) appeal to
prejudice. Apologists for the attack on Gaza depict Gazans as murderous, jihadi,
homophobic, sharia-wielding fanatics, in a word, Muslims, and therefore of course
their lives don't matter. Sound familiar?

Having been treated to these propaganda techniques repeatedly and continuously
for 8 years, the US public can suddenly hear the similarity in the assertions of Israeli
officialdom and its supporters.

Of course, the Neoconservatives had borrowed a lot of their techniques from the
Jabotinsky/ Likud tradition of revisionist Zionism, so what goes around comes around.

By the way, since Tzipi Livni admitted Sunday that her government is resisting a
diplomatic solution to Gaza and wants to keep the war going as long as possible, and
that one impediment is "the pictures coming out of Gaza"-- i.e. of dead children and
civilians and ordinary policemen, I'll just put in this link for those with a tough
stomach. Not for the squeamish (and not an endorsement of the site). Here is
another one; same caveats [links at top url]

Thanks to Lefty Coaster for the Kos Diary on yesterday's IC posting.

Juan Coles website www.juancole.com

icangetyouatoe wrote:

Meanwhile, I eat my bagel with hummus in Malibu, it's crisp and sunny outside sitting here in  everyone's favorite beachside shtetl. God bless America.

Half the country will hate you just for being in Malibu. If they could, they'd lob a rocket in your direction because you have freedom and privileges that they don't. And warmth (and running water and electricity).

I've eaten a few muffs, er, I mean bagels in Malibu.  Nice memories!

icangetyouatoe wrote:

the whole thing is obscene. The innocents suffer, again and again, on both sides, and nothing is solved.

Meanwhile, I eat my bagel with hummus in Malibu, it's crisp and sunny outside sitting here in  everyone's favorite beachside shtetl. God bless America.

It's good to be born in America, ain't it???

Zookeeper wrote:

orangeplus wrote:

Consequences, schmonsequences

Oh goody!  An excuse to blow more of them up!

I'd still love to lock Bush, Ahmadinejad, Putin, and Chavez into a small room someplace with no food, water, or bathroom facilities and let them just rip each other to shreds. Now we can add Moqtada al-Sadr to the group, as well. None of them is any more useful than the others.

icangetyouatoe wrote:

pALEPHx wrote:

icangetyouatoe wrote:

Meanwhile, I eat my bagel with hummus in Malibu, it's crisp and sunny outside sitting here in  everyone's favorite beachside shtetl. God bless America.

Half the country will hate you just for being in Malibu. If they could, they'd lob a rocket in your direction because you have freedom and privileges that they don't. And warmth (and running water and electricity).

Here's the thing, though. I think Los Angeles is actually a pretty safe place to be, because before religious beliefs, there was Pamela Anderson, and she's syndicated all over the world.

it's odd how your optimism excites me, can we sleep together?

Taint wrote:

Zookeeper wrote:

orangeplus wrote:

Consequences, schmonsequences

Oh goody!  An excuse to blow more of them up!

I'd still love to lock Bush, Ahmadinejad, Putin, and Chavez into a small room someplace with no food, water, or bathroom facilities and let them just rip each other to shreds. Now we can add Moqtada al-Sadr to the group, as well. None of them is any more useful than the others.

I have no doubt they would all get along just fine.

Taint wrote:

I'd still love to lock Bush, Ahmadinejad, Putin, and Chavez into a small room someplace with no food, water, or bathroom facilities and let them just rip each other to shreds. Now we can add Moqtada al-Sadr to the group, as well. None of them is any more useful than the others.

I'd be OK with that so long as we added Carter to the mix so he can practice his diplomacy.  It would be inhuman to put them in there without at least something to eat.

Dealing with the underlying Religious Psychosis:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite? … 2FShowFull

And everyone thinks Jihad is stupid.  Well this takes the cake, only they are on the way to achieve it.

Last edited by Dmtdust (2009-01-10 15:12:45)

Dmtdust wrote:

http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1157&Itemid=214

War sucks - any honest warrior will tell you that.

However as long as international law is the focus of the article we should discuss the fact that claiming a part (or all) of anothers nation's territory is an act of war under international law. Thus the Hamas constitution is a declaration of war on Isreal, the casulties they suffer fall in the same category as those of Japan and Germany during WW-II.

Additionally locating military forces within civilian centers is against the geneva convention; this is a tool Hamas uses constantly.

The cease fire was broke by Hamas and their splinter groups, thus the casulties are the fault fo Hamas.  Even if we ignore their unprovoked rocket attacks, they are Hamas's fault under international law.

War sucks people, everyone dies - get used to it or stop having it.

and... in case you are ignoring the blatant facts that Hamas was legally elected with encouragement from both the US and Israel to the Palestinians to have free elections, and then Israel assasinates legally elected officials  What are the laws on that?

Also, here is a wee link about where they got there funding to start up.  discuss later!  Smileys!  http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8449

Last edited by Dmtdust (2009-01-14 02:27:57)

Dmtdust wrote:

http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1157&Itemid=214

What's with the missing eyeballs?

tojo2000 wrote:

If the rockets are lit, you must acquit!

So true.

phreddy wrote:

Dmtdust wrote:

and... in case you are ignoring the blatant facts that Hamas was legally elected with encouragement from both the US and Israel to the Palestinians to have free elections, and then Israel assasinates legally elected officials  What are the laws on that?

Also, here is a wee link about where they got there funding to start up.  discuss later!  Smileys!  http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8449

It's one thing for a terrorist organization to surreptitiously attack a country, but if the forces of a legally elected government launches rockets into its neighbor, the crime is even worse.  It becomes an act of war.

Or to Blockade Food and Medicine?
Or to assassinate another countries elected officials?

Taint wrote:

'd still love to lock Bush, Ahmadinejad, Putin, and Chavez into a small room someplace with no food, water, or bathroom facilities and let them just rip each other to shreds.

Does everyone get a chew first?

Dusty,  the fact that Israel once aided Hamas is notwithstanding.  History is full instances wherein spawn turn evil and attack their creators or supporters.  Try to count the number of historical entanglements that England, France, Spain, and Germany have formed to be allies or enemies.  And this is just a part of Western Europe.