Doug Quixote June 11, 2012 at 6:41 pm
Anyone can produce footage of corpses and claim that their enemies did it; the Russians blamed the Nazis for the slaughter they themselves carried out in Katyn Forest until long after World War II, though the Nuremberg Trials doubted the provenance.
We need cool heads and solid evidence to sheet home the blame.
Jill June 11, 2012 at 7:17 pm
“A nation that kills children, tortures anyone, blows up private houses and assassinates oppositionists is a terrorist nation, discuss.”
Syria.
Gaza.
Gaza.
Syria.
Sudan.
Jordan.
Egypt.
Darfur.
Burma.
Russia/Chechnya
Pakistan.
Iran.
Iraq.
Saudi Arabia.
A blowhard misrepresenting a democracy’s legitimate and obligatory defence of itself and its people against deliberate and ongoing attempts to obliterate it is a faker, a poseur and deliberately deceptive.
Discuss.
Bob Ellis June 11, 2012 at 8:53 pm
What was obligatory in the killing of three hundred children, sometimes with phosphorous bombs, in January 2009?
I agree atrocities have occurred elsewhere, throughout world history. But what is your point in raising them?
I am reviewing a particular film, as I have in the past films about Ruanda, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, East Timor, Vietnam, and so on.
Are you saying I should not review this particular film?
Why do you say that?
M Ryutin June 12, 2012 at 10:01 am
Of course this film should be reviewed but it should be reviewed on its merits AS a documentary.
However, in the ongoing propaganda war in the middle east (which also has links to how we watch the unfolding ‘news’ from Syria), there is a thriving film and photographic industry in the middle east, highlighted by the Israel/Palestine conflict which needs watching. It is the prism through which any such claim of 300 dead by phosphorous bombs’ should be seen and judged. Even from a technical viewpoint by film professionals, this is interesting, I suspect, but for the public which is meant to digest the “news’ coming from Israel/Palestine it is vital to be aware of it.
http://www.zombietime.com/fraud/ambulance/
Canguro June 11, 2012 at 8:40 pm
It’s a Freudian nightmare, for sure. All that fine Jewish intelligence embedded within a primal swamp of historical antagonism and lower-brain fear/anger primitivity, sauced up with an endlessly restated paradigm designed to heighten the resolve of the Hebraic herd in defending themselves against the goyim cockroaches who threaten their enclave.
I think you’re right about this. The Zionist nation is historically and currently a terrorist nation. Fact. The historical antecedent was the Zionist group Irgun, (whose leader and later Israeli PM Menachem Begin was to be awarded the Nobel Peace prize). Irgun had exceptionally good form when it came to terrorising Palestinians, depopulating villages and forcing people off their historical lands and eliminating those who articulated opposition to the Zionist occupation.
How many millions of words need to be written and spoken in respect of this tragic Mediterranean landscape with its ever spinning treadmill of provocation and counteraction before enough is enough?
Doug Quixote June 11, 2012 at 9:10 pm
More to the point Canguro, how many people must die before this mess is sorted out? Will it be peace only when the last Palestinian stands over the corpse of the last Israeli, or the last Israeli stands over the corpse of the last Palestinian?
Canguro June 12, 2012 at 1:14 am
Disillusionment, logically, is a desirable position to reach on one’s life journey, yet it intrigues me that as a species we are so singularly committed to the retention of our delusions and illusions when clearly they so often work against our natural best interests, unlike any other creature on the planet.
It bears being thought about.
Israeli politics is heavily influenced by Orthodox Judaism, which itself views the world through its own unique prism, determined as it is by thousands of years of unbending viewpoint regarding the sanctity of the Talmudic teachings. Juxtaposed against this militant religiosity, and close enough to arouse sufficient friction such that continual discomfort is ensured, sit the Palestinians with their own world view, a set of beliefs that happen to clash with those of their neighbours.
Thus the stage was set for the enaction of the drama, and the gods looked down and wept, or laughed, at the madnesses thus displayed, and good men such as Dawkins (The God Delusion), and Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything) took it upon their shoulders to try to bring some semblance of counterpoint to the question of religion and its impact on societies.
I think it takes a lot of wisdom to recognise the unique capacity we have as manipulators of sound and symbol to express complex ideas, wherever we arise on the planet, and with maturity an awareness arises of the need to use language carefully and appropriately, and thus, ideally, one then takes that awareness into one’s daily life and relationships and plays one’s part in the dyadic exchange so eloquently exlored by Martin Buber in Ich und Du.
Will it be a fight to the last man standing? I’ve no idea… , but I suspect it’s possible… the Middle East is a pretty volatile place, and Israel is a very unpopular occupant.
Doug Quixote June 12, 2012 at 6:32 am
One great problem I see is that men of goodwill may broker a peace deal, which might even work; but many on their own side will see any ground given as a betrayal, and the negotiators as traitors. With the usual result.
On the basis that if you don’t laugh you cry, I suspect that if Jesus Christ or Muhammad or both were to appear and make peace, they would be crucified or ‘translated’ afresh.
It is sad.
Name:
It strikes me as extraordinarily hard to separate a desire for peace from a desire for justice in the minds of people who are affected by these conflicts.
We can talk about wanting to make a just peace for the future in a way that makes some kind of sense. And we should. It seems obligatory!
But when the tyrant has but one life to give as punishment for the many he has taken or ruined then where is the justice for events in the past?
There may be less point in knowing with hindsight which atrocities should be blamed on whom when the way forwards clearly depends on parties reciprocating a desire for peace that depends on finding ways to forgive past deeds they cannot undo and concentrating on the kind of future that they can affect for the better.
As for terrorism its just a code word for the violence of those radical groups whose actions are never regarded as legitimate by states who are for the most part themselves thoroughly hypocritical in their use of illegitimate and often disproportionate force. Of course we need a wider definition of terrorism to include state and state sponsored varieties, but then it makes no sense to imagine declaring both sides of any conflict to be “legitimate” in their use of force.
Maybe we could just realise that violence solves nothing, but the price of that for powerful states and the US in particular is possibly too high to ever be acceptable. So the word terrorist retains its utility to excuse responding to criminal acts by radicalised groups across international borders in kind and without respect for the sovereignty of the states where we need to conduct operations against them to protect our interests. The “war on terror” is made to seem obligatory when it is not!
The terms of a just peace are seldom as difficult to discern as propaganda would have us assent to.