quote:

On the note of “triumph” I’m curious if Israel would leverage the UN or EU to provide ships for an evacuation of Gaza. “We have to continue to the sea and wipe out Hamas politically, to do so humanely requires a civilian evacuation beyond our resourcing to complete. We call on the world to help evacuate innocents before the ground campaign begins.” Might be effective.

Have a hard time buying into the "evac the innocent" plan, do we really want to help spread the Hamas contingent that will be inbedded into that crowd as a means to deliver those people who are committed to the cause worldwide, anymore so than we do now.

Look at the Palestine protests in the USA, we have so many blocks of these folks, excited and celebrating the deaths of women and children, it's what they grew up with and accept.

Look at the problems with the middle east "refugees" that have created settlements in Paris, London, Minneapolis and other cities around the world.

Moving them and imbedding them into civil societies that have long moved past the lives they've lived under ancient terrorist rule isn't a good idea...

Even Egypt knows it's not a smart move, it's why they closed their borders. None of the Arab states wants these people crossing their borders.

quote:

Originally posted by arabiancowboy:

Good post. Children are innocent. That said, when children inevitably die as collateral for Israeli actions, it’s important we blame those deaths on Hamas for engaging in illegal warfare. It’s a concept the West has grappled with (unsuccessfully), but in truth terrorist tactics are evil not just because of the innocents they directly kill (Israeli children in this case) but also for the innocents they endanger by placing responders in an impossible position where we cannot defend ourselves without killing innocents we want to protect.

Agreed, but there is more than simply the Israelis fighting back. There are several other considerations.

The immediate consideration is that the intent of the instigators, Hamas in this case, is to continue attacking and killing innocents as long as they can, hopefully (in their minds) resulting in the eradication of all Jewish people. Meanwhile, Hamas intentionally place their own non-combatants as shields. As parents of these shields, they are making the choice to do this with their own families.

Thus, I would contend it is not the responsibility of the Israelis to protect Palestinian children. The righteous priority is defeating the aggressor.

Secondly there is preventing future atrocities, which will ultimately save many more innocent lives than might be lost in this conflict. It is the same logic as dropping the bomb on Hiroshima. Islamic terrorists have used their own as human shields for decades because it works. Because we let it work. And that enables them to perpetrate more violent attacks. Restraint in the past has emboldened the enemy to perpetrate this war.

For the truly innocent who might perish in Gaza, there will be many others in the future who do not. For me, this is the reason for Israel to ensure total victory now.

Seeing Para's post "the children of Gaza" reminds me of photos from Japan, Okinawa, and the two nukes, where no doubt lots of innocents died along with the perpetrators of terrible evil.

When you have a population of adults waging war with a psychopathic mindset and indifference, it took an incredibly brutal demonstration to snap them out of that before a real peace could take place.
The difference here is that the Japanese, and the Germans as well, had only lived under a brutal dictatorship for a decade or so when this happened. The Middle East has been like this for centuries.
I hope that after whatever horrors happen in the Middle East now, they have a similar change in behavior but I'm not convinced this will be a long term solution.
I'm also not suggesting I have any special insight or better way to deal with this terrible situation.

quote:

Originally posted by sse:
I disagree. People making these kind of statements gain many allies.

Sometimes, as in this case, they get all worked up revealing their true point of view before thinking better of it, then lie to cover it up. Evil dropped its guard.

As far as it being on the internet forever, that is incorrect. It is not truly on the internet unless the gatekeepers allow access to it, without which it may as well never have happened.

It IS forever! It's here, it's on hundreds (thousands?) of other websites. It's being shared by multitudes of people and the access is worldwide. The data is being accumulated & archived by interested groups and individuals to be shared in the future, as well. It's also being archived by gov't agencies and corporate interests in this and other countries. It can't be scrubbed completely, ever! It's naive to think otherwise!


Edited for Brevity...

Behind Hamas' massacre is Iran. Iran best described as evil and insane needs to be recognized as the true threat to a stable world. The US, known to them as the great Satan, has whipped up trouble of all sorts including the kidnapping of citizens, murdering our troops in Iraq yet Obama and Biden feed the large stashes of cash. The time has come to end financial support of Iran and the idiotic one-sided "deal" Kerry and Obama posed over nuclear arms. The Hamas savagery should be a wake-up call for America. We could be Iran's next target with a nuclear device coming through our wide open border in a truck.

Yes, the deaths of any innocent Palestinians- children included- are the responsibility of Hamas and any organizations who aid Hamas, but, distilling it down to its essence, dead is dead no matter who is responsible, and cutting off the lives of those who haven't even had a chance to experience the world is unforgivable.

So, what's the answer? I don't know and I don't think anyone does.

The fact that these terrorists hide behind children is despicable, utterly abhorrent. Surgical precision is required to remove this cancer from the world but it's not possible to apply a deft hand in all aspects of cutting out this tumor.

quote:

Originally posted by sdy:
https://www.cnn.com/middleeast...-10-11-23/index.html

Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on Earth, where some 2 million people live in an area of 140 square miles. More than half of its population lives in poverty and is food insecure, with nearly 80% relying on humanitarian assistance.

The electricity supply to Gaza "will completely stop within hours," limiting the ability to provide basic services, the enclave's Hamas-controlled government said on Wednesday.

Israeli forces have been hammering Gaza with airstrikes since Saturday, hitting hundreds of targets and reducing neighborhoods to rubble, following unprecedented Hamas terror attacks on Israel.

"All basic services in Gaza depend on electricity, and it will not be possible to partially operate them with generators due to the prevention of fuel supplies through the Rafah gate," the Gaza government media office said in a statement.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) said late Monday it has been forced to close all 14 of its food distribution centers in Gaza and “as a result half a million people have stopped receiving vital food aid.”

and:

Gaza’s only power station has stopped working after running out of fuel, the head of the Gaza power authority Galal Ismail told CNN on Wednesday.

“Gaza is currently without power,” Ismail said.

The US government is in discussions with its partner countries, including Egypt and Israel, about ensuring safe passage for Americans and other civilians out of Gaza, US officials said.

However, according to one US official, Egypt wants to use a humanitarian corridor to send food and medical supplies into Gaza but doesn’t want to open the border in the other direction to accept fleeing civilians.


State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller:

"It is our top priority to protect the safety and security of Americans overseas," "I will also say, as the president said yesterday, we don't want to see civilian deaths anywhere. We want to see civilians protected. We want to see civilians not targeted. We expect Israel to follow the laws of war."

If the gazans had spent at least some of the $47 Billion they were given by Israel as a 'farewell gift' a few years back on emergency infrastructure, instead of rockets, guns and tunelling equipment, they might not be so short of power right now. As it is........it's sad for the ordinary poverty-strocken gazans, but it need never have been that way.

Alert sirens all over north spark fears of aerial infiltration

Upper Galilee Council chairman says infiltrators used paragliders in repeat of tactics Hamas used in massacre.

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/378319

Warning sirens were activated in many communities in northern Israel as over a dozen terrorists on paragliders are believed to have penetrated Israeli territory from Lebanon this evening (Wednesday).

Upper Galilee Regional Council chairman Giora Salz told Channel 12 News that "manned paragliders have been observed entering from Lebanon. We ask all residents to lock themselves down." He called on residents to lock their doors and announced that the members of the council's emergency department should prepare for an emergency.

According to initial reports, a suspected 15-20 paragliders are believed to have penetrated Israeli airspace. The same method was used during the Hamas invasion of southern Israel and massacre of of over 1,200 Israelis on Saturday.

Rosh Pina Mayor Moti Hatiel said that the security personnel are securing his community.

An IDF spokesman informed that all residents in the areas where alerts sounded in the north are asked to enter their protected areas and stay there until further notice. Combat helicopters were launched and it is estimated that several unmanned aircraft were launched from the Lebanon area towards the Galilee. No casualties are known so far. Hamas claimed that they fired rockets in the direction of Haifa in northern Israel.

One craft crashed in the Metulah area. A possible terrorist infiltration was reported in the northern city of Ma'alot-Tarshiha, and turned out to be a false alarm.

As a result of the red siren alerts in northern Israel, United Hatzalah volunteers have treated nearly ten people who sustained light injuries while running to their protective rooms.

In addition, the United Hatzalah Psychotrauma and Crisis Response Unit treated a number of people who sustained emotional shock as a result of the sirens.

Earlier, the US government announced that the American embassy in Beirut would be evacuated for fear that Hezbollah would drag Lebanon into another conflict with Israel. American citizens in Lebanon were also instructed to leave the country.

Someone screwed up and a bit of truth got out in the New York Times, but they caught it and hid it under their pile of horse shit.

One of the worst outcomes of "progress" is the notion that wars are to be fought surgically. Civilian deaths are to be avoided otherwise it's a "war crime." This is a very recent occurrence. War, by its very nature, is ugly and needs to be left as such, not sanitized to make it palatable.

War is not supposed to be OK as long as you try not to kill certain classes of people. War is supposed to be vile and bloody and horrible. So horrible that the only viable alternative is peace. This nice guy in war attitude is horseshit.

quote:

The Hamas savagery should be a wake-up call for America.

Israel And Hamas Are Embroiled In A Zero-Sum Religious War, And So Is The West
By: John Daniel Davidson

The events of the past 120 hours have made it abundantly clear that Israel can no longer coexist alongside Hamas. The violence unleashed by Hamas against unarmed civilians, including women and children and the elderly — much of it filmed and livestreamed online — has shocked the world. On Tuesday, we learned that at a kibbutz near the Gaza border called Kfar Aza, Hamas terrorists slaughtered entire families, including at least 40 babies and small children, some of whom they beheaded.

The Western world has not seen this kind of barbarity in nearly 80 years, and most of us recoil from it in horror and incomprehension. Make no mistake: Kfar Aza will take its place in history alongside Auschwitz and Treblinka. The evil of Hamas is that kind of evil, perhaps not in scale but in kind. In some ways, it is worse because while the Nazis took care to hide what they were doing from the world, Hamas has broadcast its atrocities, boasted and reveled in them. All Hamas members are guilty and deserve swift execution.

Delivering justice to Hamas is now Israel’s grim task, and they will go about it as best they can. But another, perhaps more difficult, task is confronting the Western world at large. In the immediate wake of the Hamas atrocities, demonstrations were staged all over the Western world — in support of Hamas. Those who marched in the streets, who signed pro-Hamas student statements, who posted memes online praising Hamas are not, by and large, antisemitic neo-Nazis. They are left-wing zealots, BLM and LGBT activists, the woke grandchildren of radical Baby Boomer politics, brain-washed by “anticolonialism” propaganda, which they regurgitated before a watching world.

This should not surprise you. The people who cheer the beheading of babies are of course those who also cheer the slaughter of babies in the womb. They are, like Islam itself, post-Christian, and their morality, like the morality of Hamas, is decidedly pagan. That means they do not believe in universal human rights or inherent human dignity. They do not believe in the Christian doctrine of imago Dei and the moral imperatives that flow from it. They do not believe in objective morality or truth. They reject the Christian precepts that constitute the basis for Western civilization.

These are the barbarians who reside beyond the gates of the Christian West. They believe only in power, and they will do whatever they can to gain it. Once they have it, they will exercise it as they see fit, unconstrained by questions of right and wrong, or notions of justice and morality whose premises they reject. They will not have qualms about their own hypocrisy or inconsistency. Appeals to compassion and mercy will fall on deaf ears.

These are the same people, after all, who insist that “words are violence” and that debates and free speech and even jokes must be suppressed because of the “harm” they cause to vulnerable and marginalized people. If you say a man cannot become a woman, they want you to be fired, to be silenced, to lose everything. If you say we must not castrate and mutilate children in the name of gender ideology, they want your own kids to be taken from you. Confronted by the wholesale slaughter of women and children, the decapitation of babies by armed men, they respond with a shrug and a meme. They do not care about violence as such, they simply want to be the ones to wield it.

Do not think these people are just confused or ignorant. They are pagans, and like the Hamas terrorists whom they champion, they cannot be reasoned with or accommodated. If it is obvious that Israel and Hamas cannot coexist, it is equally obvious that these two worlds, the Christian and the pagan, also cannot coexist. We will become all one thing or all the other.

Under such circumstances, we need to recognize this struggle for what it is: a fundamentally religious struggle between two irreconcilable religious worldviews. For many centuries the Christian West was able to see this clearly. It’s why the Catholic Church worked tirelessly for centuries to stamp out paganism in northern Europe. It’s why the Spanish conquistadors, confronted by human sacrifice cults in the New World, toppled them and razed their temples. They understood that there could be no peace with such a regime. It had to be destroyed utterly.

So the problem we confront today is old, and the solution is the same. But do we even have the ability, at this late hour, to recognize the problem and do what is necessary? Probably not. We are likely too far along in the process of dechristianization.

Just look at how we responded to 9/11. Many have been calling the Hamas attack Israel’s 9/11, which is an apt comparison. But Israel should not make the mistake America and its leaders did. We did not recognize the 9/11 attacks as a religious act. In fact, we actively denied that the massacre was religiously motivated, and so we failed to respond on religious grounds. Remember the infamous words of then-President George W. Bush immediately after the massacre of 3,000 Americans. Surrounded by Islamic leaders who more or less shared the basic worldview of the al-Qaeda terrorists, he proclaimed that Islam was a “religion of peace,” and insisted there could be no connection between the killing and the religion the killers professed.

It was incredible to behold at the time. And what followed was equally incredible. We invaded Iraq on the premise that the Iraqis were just like us, or that we could make them like us. Absurdities followed. The State Department flew political scientists to Baghdad to devise an “Islamic” basis for constitutionalism and the rule of law. In Afghanistan, we went well beyond offering education to Afghan girls and women and instead spent decades and untold billions catechizing them into gender theory and queer studies. For years our leaders repeated ad nauseum the fatuous notion that deep down all people want to be free. Never did it occur to them that some people would rather have justice or power or revenge.

All of these things were indications that we had finally severed ties with our Christian past and stepped firmly, perhaps without realizing it, into the pagan future. We never grappled with the root causes of 9/11, never entertained the notion that a people’s relationship to God shaped everything and was therefore insurmountable. All such discussion was totally absent from the public square. We bought into the lie that all religions are the same, democracy and classical liberalism are fungible and can be imposed at will on any culture, and that religious differences are mostly matters of aesthetics.

What a monstrous lie — and a dangerous one, too, as we are learning every day now. The conflict unfolding in the Middle East is fundamentally religious in ways that are fairly obvious. What is less obvious, because we are a post-Christian people, is that the conflict unfolding in America is equally religious. Hamas and the pagans stand on one side; Christians and Jews stand on the other. Only one side is going to win.

https://thefederalist.com/2023...-and-so-is-the-west/

quote:

Originally posted by pace40:
One of the worst outcomes of "progress" is the notion that wars are to be fought surgically. Civilian deaths are to be avoided otherwise it's a "war crime." This is a very recent occurrence. War, by its very nature, is ugly and needs to be left as such, not sanitized to make it palatable.

War is not supposed to be OK as long as you try not to kill certain classes of people. War is supposed to be vile and bloody and horrible. So horrible that the only viable alternative is peace. This nice guy in war attitude is horseshit.

Communication technology is responsible for the acute awareness the public has for the horror of war. It began with the Civil War photographs of Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner (though the first photographs of war dead were made by someone whose name most people do not know).

It took decades, though, after the publication of those photos for the real-life horrors of war to begin to approach our collective psyche in a significant way- with the advent of small, hand-held cameras and faster film and lenses- but it is the smartphone with it's two high-resolution, low-light cameras that has plopped the reality and the stench of death of war into our laps.

I don't think we can excuse or ignore what technology has allowed those of us who have not been to war, to know. Pointing out that humanity's heightened concern for the safety of the innocent in war is a recent trend implies that because of the long-established history of discounting the innocent in war, it's perfectly OK to continue in the same manner. The truth is that we cannot un-see things. There's not been a jury anywhere at any time that has heeded the judge's warning that they should disregard some bit of shocking testimony.

Therefore, saying that war is horrific and brutal has no effect upon our recent revelation of how very true is that observation.

The is a saying, a very old saying. I've heard it a lot but have no idea who coined it or how old it is, but it is clearly true.

I am sure when coined it referred to the children of fathers they'd never see again, or mothers lost in an attack on the city, or perhaps they themselves as victims of a bombing, artillery attack, land mine, etc.

I don't believe that the author of that phrase likely conceived that children would be the actual target of military aggression. Specifically targeted due to the impact it would have on the opposing force.

That is why this is different. That is why the world needs to stand up and say not again. No more.... ENOUGH!

quote:

Originally posted by HRK:
[QUOTE]
Even Egypt knows it's not a smart move, it's why they closed their borders. None of the Arab states wants these people crossing their borders.

Egypt is making a smart move here. It's not always *just* innocent civilians turned refugees who are fleeing a war zone into neighboring countries. History has shown that enemy combatants routinely mask themselves as refugees to evade capture. Post WW2, several Nazi's fled postwar Germany and the tribunals to avoid accountability. Tacitly, Egypt is helping out Israel by making sure all the bad apples are stuck in Gaza and unable to disappear into their country to live and fight another day.

I question whether anyone in the civilian population of Gaza is truly innocent and not part of the Hamas fueled hatred of Israel.

Children are born innocent but are quickly indoctrinated into the purpose of their people. Mothers say they are proud to raise children who become suicide martyrs for Hamas and overall, I don't know what in Gaza isn't run, inspired or focused on hating Israel.

It's sad that children's innocence and souls are lost but I don't know how you "rescue" them when everything around them, including schools teaching hatred and death, and they believe this is how life is.

Does that mean that truly innocent citizens of Gaza will get out and disavow the Hamas led hatred of Israel and lead a different life? I don't think anyone is that naive. Instead, I think it's just scattering the seeds of hatred that will take root somewhere else.

Hamas leader and founding member Khaled Mashal has called for Friday the 13th to be a day of a global Muslim uprising, calling it the "Friday of Al-Aqsa Flood"

https://www.thegatewaypundit.c...bal-muslim-uprising/
https://gellerreport.com/2023/...alls-for-blood.html/

Other publications like Reuters are calling this a call for global protest. This Friday the 13th.

quote:

Originally posted by HRK:

quote:

On the note of “triumph” I’m curious if Israel would leverage the UN or EU to provide ships for an evacuation of Gaza. “We have to continue to the sea and wipe out Hamas politically, to do so humanely requires a civilian evacuation beyond our resourcing to complete. We call on the world to help evacuate innocents before the ground campaign begins.” Might be effective.

Have a hard time buying into the "evac the innocent" plan, [snip]

I’m sure you’re right, as well as gearhounds in saying that Hamas won’t let anyone flee. However, there might be some propaganda value for Israel in making the request even though they know it will never happen.

EU Spent $100M On Pipelines That Hamas Turned Into Rockets.

https://thenationalpulse.com/2...turned-into-rockets/

The European Union (EU) spent $100 million of taxpayer funds on building over 30 miles of water pipelines for Palestinians in Gaza, despite Hamas having bragged about their ability to turn the piping materials into makeshift rockets online. The EU participated in a number of initiatives between 2015 and 2022 to ensure Palestinians have fresh water, including working alongside UNICEF to install an 11-mile pipeline to Khan Yunus and Raha in southern Gaza. Footage emerged, in 2021, of Hamas fighters digging up the pipes and fashioning them into rockets to launch over the border into Israel. Despite this, the EU bankrolled another 10 miles of pipelines in 2022. The main missile used by Hamas – an internationally recognized “terrorist organization” – is the Qassam rocket, which is assembled using industrial piping along with chemicals and explosives. “There must be prudent security assessments before giving taxpayers’ money to Palestinian organizations for infrastructure that can be utilized for military ends by Hamas terrorists,” argued Frank Furedi, executive director of the MCC Brussels think tank. “Those running EU diplomacy are naive,” he added.

Some thoughts expressed during a darker time in our history by our own architect of scorched earth:
"War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.
And:
"War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen and I say let us give them all they want".
William Tecumseh Sherman
There is nothing new under the sun when it comes to war.

I saw a report that 600,000 German civilians died from the bombings during WWII. Who knows how many died in the Tokyo fire-bombing or Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

It's a terrible thing, that, but unfortunately it was necessary in order to defeat and take away the will to fight from the enemy. We are now approaching 100 years of peace with those nations.

Anyone with a soul doesn't want to do these things, but sometimes these things need to be done. No other approach to those animals has worked in 600 years of dealing with them.

“When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”
― Golda Meir, A Land of Our Own: An Oral Autobiography

They chose it. Whatever outcome occurs, they forced it upon themselves.