Israel/Gaza: human shields

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Israel/Gaza: human shields

Postby Penta » Wed Mar 17, 2010 1:24 pm

For those who kept denying that Israeli soldiers used Palestinians as human shields (apparently only Hamas did), here's a case of soldiers allegedly using a 9-year-old boy as a shield. It's only the second case so far in Israel's investigations into its behaviour in Gaza that has led to an actual indictment, but it's a step in the right direction at least.
Israeli troops charged over use of boy as human shield

The Israeli military has charged two of its soldiers with endangering the life of a Palestinian boy during Israel's offensive against Hamas in Gaza.
The army said the soldiers, who had been searching a building, had instructed the nine-year-old to open bags they suspected were booby-trapped.
This practice, banned by the Israeli military, is known as using someone as a human shield.
Use of civilians as human shields is widely considered a war crime.
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Re: Israel/Gaza: human shields

Postby coldharvest » Wed Mar 17, 2010 1:39 pm

.....like the Pals give a shit about their kids.
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Re: Israel/Gaza: human shields

Postby Penta » Wed Mar 17, 2010 2:17 pm

Let's regard every last Palestinian adult as a suicide bomber, shall we?
This is the sort of rational argument I'm urged to emulate, is it?
Motes and beams, did you say?
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Re: Israel/Gaza: human shields

Postby coldharvest » Wed Mar 17, 2010 3:13 pm

Penta wrote:Let's regard every last Palestinian adult as a suicide bomber, shall we?
This is the sort of rational argument I'm urged to emulate, is it?
Motes and beams, did you say?

I don't school my children in hate, nationalism or violence.
They are taught and live by the Golden Rule.

The people of Palestine freely chose Hamas as their representatives....why do you hate democracy?
.......reaping what you sow has nothing to do with ocular obstructions.
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Re: Israel/Gaza: human shields

Postby Penta » Wed Mar 17, 2010 3:58 pm

coldharvest wrote:I don't school my children in hate, nationalism or violence.

I should hope not.

The people of Palestine freely chose Hamas as their representatives....why do you hate democracy?

Is that not something of a logical leap too? I would have thought that accusation would be better flung at those who insisted on elections in the OPT and when they didn't like the result used it as a reason to attack them again.
The people of Britain freely chose Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party: does that make me a Thatcherite? And then they chose Tony Blair and the Labour Party: does that make flipflop, say, a Blairite? The leap between a majority vote for Hamas and accusing Palestinians as a people of not giving a shit about their children is rather more extreme than that. And as an argument that therefore there's nothing wrong with using an individual small child as a human shield it's despicable. But keep digging if you like.
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Re: Israel/Gaza: human shields

Postby coldharvest » Wed Mar 17, 2010 4:10 pm

You get the government you deserve, the Pals got Hamas.
You deserved both Thatcher and Blair.
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Re: Israel/Gaza: human shields

Postby Penta » Wed Mar 17, 2010 4:27 pm

That may be true. So? Relevance to the question at hand?
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Re: Israel/Gaza: human shields

Postby coldharvest » Wed Mar 17, 2010 4:34 pm

why shouldn't the Jew boys get the kid to open his Palestinian friends bag?
surely they Palestinians are looking out for their own?
unless of course they've chosen the path of madness like so many others have and will

I think both sides are abominations but I'm not an anti-semite
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Re: Israel/Gaza: human shields

Postby Penta » Wed Mar 17, 2010 5:56 pm

coldharvest wrote:why shouldn't the Jew boys get the kid to open his Palestinian friends bag?

"bags they suspected were booby-trapped"
It's wrong on so many levels, and I really shouldn't have to spell it out, but let's just try your Golden Rule.
Why shouldn't a couple of invading soldiers (Russian, German, Chinese, French - whoever best fits your worldview), who suspect some bags in Casa Harvest (or next door - I know there isn't one, but try using your imagination - which has been used as a base by the Yorkshire branch of the national resistance movement) are booby-trapped, stand well out of range and force little Harvest junior to open them for them and absorb in his sweet innocent body the suspected explosion?
Perfectly cool, right? Do as you would be done by.
I recall you describing, on more than one occasion, and in graphic detail, what you would do to anyone who so much as looked askance at one of your children.

Here's another, more realistic, analogy: why shouldn't the sappers or other bomb disposal units in Afghanistan round up random Afghan kids to walk or drive over the IEDs they've located rather than waste their precious time and risk their own lives dismantling them?

I think both sides are abominations but I'm not an anti-semite

There we agree more or less, though "abominations" is a stronger word than I would use. But I fear you're accusing me of anti-semitism.
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Re: Israel/Gaza: human shields

Postby coldharvest » Wed Mar 17, 2010 6:18 pm

The little harvesters wouldn't be used as meat-shields by terrorists in the first place as they use the willing Palestinian population.
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Re: Israel/Gaza: human shields

Postby Penta » Wed Mar 17, 2010 6:31 pm

Tu quoque is the best you've got?
Shes never interfered with me. I have no complaints about her.
Same here.
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Penta has always been gracious, kind and very sane in all my interactions with her.
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Re: Israel/Gaza: human shields

Postby coldharvest » Wed Mar 17, 2010 6:37 pm

Penta wrote:Tu quoque is the best you've got?

if you can posit fantasy worlds were enemy combatants would get within touching distance of my children then I can equally present one in which it's inconceivable.

and in a world that they do then the little harvesters know what to do......when you supporters of a side kick in our front door we know how we're going to go.
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Re: Israel/Gaza: human shields

Postby Aussie TJS » Thu Mar 18, 2010 4:38 am

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Re: Israel/Gaza: human shields

Postby Penta » Sun Mar 28, 2010 6:19 pm

coldharvest wrote:.....like the Pals give a shit about their kids.

Aussie TJS wrote:http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/2289.htm
http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/2291.htm


I'm still exercised by this, the notion that because Hamas tries to indoctrinate children in hatred (unquestionably deplorable and to be condemned), somehow it follows that Palestinians in general don't care about their kids. And then to use this as justification for whatever indignity (even if no more) one wants to inflict on them - and their children.

Would anyone accept without caveats what seem to me to be the same sort of generalisations (involving present or recent policies or actions of their authorities):
The Brits are baby-killers (abortion)
The Poles are anti-semitic
The Czechs are racists (Gypsies)
or
The Americans are war-mongers ...
let alone use them to say those whole people deserve what's coming to them?

They're all to a greater or lesser degree dehumanising, and even where there's some objective truth behind them, the application to a whole people can't to my mind be right.
Similarly, but without the government angle, there are indiscriminately applied stereotypes such as:
Gypsies are thieves
French Arabs are racaille ('scum' - Sarkozy)

which also seem to me reprehensible. And from there it looks to be only a short step to say:

Moslems are terrorists
Catholics are paedophiles
and
Jews are vermin
with all the consequences of that.

One of the first things I learnt when I set to with logic books was about black swans, which I thought would apply here, but I'm told that it doesn't. Since it is a general trait of swans to be white, particular individual exceptions (black swans; non-racist Czechs; honest Gypsies; Palestinians who love their children/don't indoctrinate them to hate Israelis) don't apparently make the proposition incorrect.

It also seems to be a form of the fallacy of guilt by association.

I feel sure if I made an unqualified accusation that Americans in general are war-mongers (which of course I don't think and wouldn't say), I'd be pulled up immediately (and rightly so). So how is it OK to say the Palestinians don't care about their children?
Shes never interfered with me. I have no complaints about her.
Same here.
Mega ditto.
I met her once and I found her to be a nice lady. Not kookey in any way.
Penta has always been gracious, kind and very sane in all my interactions with her.
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Re: Israel/Gaza: human shields

Postby Lost Boy » Fri Apr 02, 2010 8:02 pm

Penta wrote:The Americans are war-mongers ...

Here's my two cents on the matter.

Many of us are warmongers.

I don't know if what you say is true or not, but one of the philosophies I strongly believe in is "Si vis pacem, para bellum"

However, I also strongly espouse Thomas Jefferson's philosophies regarding war:

"Conquest is not in our principles. It is inconsistent with our government."
"I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind."
"I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another."
"In defense of our persons and properties under actual violation, we took up arms. When that violence shall be removed, when hostilities shall cease on the part of the aggressors, hostilities shall cease on our part also."
"Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state."

When Winston Churchill warned the British people that Nazi Germany was preparing for war and would conquer Europe if Britain didn't take immediate action to hamper their ability to do so, he was called a warmonger by the great majority of his own people. After the invasion of the Sudetenland, Neville Chamberlain gave a great big long speech in defense of his appeasement policy, talking to great lengths about all that GB had suffered in the first WW, and why war was bad, etc. etc. What a cod.

The British were lucky as hell to have Churchill. If he ran for British politics today, he would probably be well hated.

If you seek peace, prepare for war.
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