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ORIGINAL: UBsincere

Maybe, just maybe the plan was to have "him" take the first bullet fired from his fellow citizens AK47's.

Or, maybe that fact stopped someone from taking the shot in the first place?

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ORIGINAL: RealityLicks

If anyone is to be named credulous Ken, its you.  Did you really think that the confessions of the IDF troops would be left unchallenged by the hierarchy?  Operation Cast Lead was a punitive expedition and you'd have to be a gut-level racist or else extremely gullible to think otherwise.

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ORIGINAL: DomKen

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ORIGINAL: Politesub53

I think its ludicrous to suggest that if you are critical of the recent IDF actions, then you support Hamas.

Has anyone in this thread made that claim?

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It is possible, I criticize both sides and have never been called a supporter of terrorists on this issue at least, but if you simply spew not credible attacks against the IDF and try to minimize the bad acts of Hamas then yes you are going to be accused of supporting terrorism.

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ORIGINAL: DomKen

No.  Firm and I have based our opinions on you on the fact that you credulously accepted the Hamas position on every issue so far covered.

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ORIGINAL: DomKen

Some IDF soldiers did some bad things. That always happens in war. My point that you refuse to understand is that Israel was the attacked party and has an inviolable right to self defence. If you want those bad things to stop happening then the root cause has to be addressed and that is terror attacks by palestinians.

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ORIGINAL: DomKen
 
Of course it was punitive. Armed conflict is always punitive. That doesn't make it wrong or a war crime.

Some IDF soldiers did some bad things. That always happens in war. My point that you refuse to understand is that Israel was the attacked party and has an inviolable right to self defence. If you want those bad things to stop happening then the root cause has to be addressed and that is terror attacks by palestinians.

The palestinians allow a terrorist organization to hide amongst them and there is a price to be paid for that. I feel bad for the innocents who died but I can't see any way around it if the palestinian people continue to support genocidal terrorists.

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ORIGINAL: KaineD

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ORIGINAL: DomKen

Some IDF soldiers did some bad things. That always happens in war. My point that you refuse to understand is that Israel was the attacked party and has an inviolable right to self defence. If you want those bad things to stop happening then the root cause has to be addressed and that is terror attacks by palestinians.

No, you're wrong.  I'm afraid that's way too simplistic.  The root cause and the current problems are explained in the following link, by Oxford professor of international relations and former Israeli soldier Avi Shlaim.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/07/gaza-israel-palestine

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ORIGINAL: RealityLicks
                                                                                                                                        I Meant punitive in intent, not merely in terms of individual actions. To be clear, it was meant to be yet another object lesson for the Palestinians that the appropriate response to superior firepower, that is, the response Israel demands, is fear and abjection. Wisely, the Palestinians have learned that the only viable survival tactic against a bully is to stand up to them, never to acquiesce and further empower them.
This explains the rise of Hamas. Not anti-semitism or hatred of Israel but simply the desire to survive it - fight fire with fire.

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And I meant punitive because the attacks which have motivated the videos at the top of the thread were attacks on civilian targets. Either the IDF misson included these targets or else it fields the worst marksmen in history.

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One other thing. "Palestinians" is a proper noun and therefore requires a capital letter upon each use. Why do you insist on spelling it with a small "P", do you have something against them?

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ORIGINAL: DomKen
The palestinians allow a terrorist organization to hide amongst them and there is a price to be paid for that. I feel bad for the innocents who died but I can't see any way around it if the palestinian people continue to support genocidal terrorists.

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ORIGINAL: LadyEllen

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ORIGINAL: DomKen
The palestinians allow a terrorist organization to hide amongst them and there is a price to be paid for that. I feel bad for the innocents who died but I can't see any way around it if the palestinian people continue to support genocidal terrorists.

One has to wonder what the view might have been, had the British sealed off half of Belfast, allowing in only a tiny proportion of the food and water required by the population there, denying the residents health resources and cutting off the power for a few years, before bombarding it for several days with battlefield munitions designed for open war theatres and delivered by artillery and from the air, prior to driving tanks in and flattening homes and businesses in an attempt to kill or capture the few hundred IRA and Sinn Fein members that lived there?

One tends to think that had the British done all that and not killed any civilians, the outcry worldwide - and perhaps especially from north America - would have been deafening, with barely a mention of the terrorist nature of the targets of the operation. The British would have become pariahs overnight, regarded without question as war criminals and pursued by international law enforcement to the ends of the Earth. How much more so had they managed to kill as much as one civilian inadvertently, let alone several hundred including women and children - and how much more so still were there the slightest evidence that such deaths had been anything but accidental. Arguments about terrorists hiding amongst the population would simply not have been accepted.

Still, there is so clearly nothing in common between the above situation and that of Gaza that its hardly worth discussing.

E

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ORIGINAL: DomKen

Try presenting something by a less biased source perhaps try finding someone who actually acknowledges that Britain tried to prevent jewish migration to the area, which Avi denies despite overwhelming evidence.

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ORIGINAL: DomKen

Two things, fisrt no one is starving in Gaza despite propoganda you've apparently heard. Starvation is visually diagnosable, distinctive swollen belly is the most telling, and you won't ever see that from Gaza.

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Secondly you might want to go over my posting history before trying to tie the IRA to me. I have always opposed terrorists whether they be my Irish cousins or Arabs. If Derry housed a terror group whose stated goal was the eradication of the Protestants who routinely randomly killed civilians throughout England then I would be completely comfortable with rooting out those terrorists by what ever means were necessary.

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ORIGINAL: KaineD

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ORIGINAL: BadJezebel

Housesub4U refered to this and you replied, "Anti-Muslim rhetoric really has no place here.  I've been called anti-semetic for a lot less than this."    I'm saying that his post is not anti-Muslim rhetoric.  It's Mulim rhetoric.  You can re-read it if you didn't get it the first time. 

What I mean is, are you saying religion is to blame?  Or are you saying religion has been misused?

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ORIGINAL: KaineD
This shows how little you know about the conflict in Northern Ireland.

There are several loyalist groups whose stated aims are to simply murder Catholics, and they've killed many over the years.

So we can be thankful we don't have a reactionary man in power like yourself who would make a situation worse by completely over-reacting and shutting everything down, closing people in, and bombing half of Belfast to rubble.

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ORIGINAL: FullCircle

There is tentative peace nothing more; sooner or later all political leaders lose credibility with the ones holding the guns seeking what they see as decisive action. Sinn Fein were once the same holding violent figures that fought in it's ranks but no one can fight forever and so as age creeps up on them they move into political solutions. This however doesn't quell the new upstarts and they only respect the history of the old guard for as long as they can stomach what they see as negative things being agreed to in their name.

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ORIGINAL: FullCircle

Makes me sick and angry violent figures gain political credibility by swapping hats and saying more or less their violence of the past was justified by the support they now have in politics, or could it be people kept them in politics to keep them from guns?