Comments by "kgb gb" (@kgbgb3663) on "Biden White House Israel-Hamas war, diplomacy failure" video.
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@mandysylvan5860 That's what I always thought they were doing, and why I have followed them for longer than I can remember. If they carried on doing that, I would be delighted. But Alexander just can't manage it.
He is obviously viscerally disgusted by Israeli civilian casualties at the hands of Palestinians (and uses emotive terms to describe them and to call for punishment), but not the other way around. I could tolerate both or neither, but not privileging the lives of one set of people over the other. Especially as he is falling into line with the MSM view that it is the lives of the (European) colonists that really matter, and not those of the indigenous inhabitants of the land, who had no choice about being the subjects of dispossession.
Perhaps it's just a difference in backgrounds and socialisation. He lives in North London, the spiritual home of the British Establishment Dinner Party, while I spent most of my life working in an international college where I sometimes had to think hard to remember what race some of my favourite students were, if they were not there in front of me.
The other day, Alexander almost dismissed Norman Finkelstein as a potential guest on the grounds that he was too emotionally involved in the conflict, presumably not realising that his own emotional partiality to the other side had been clearly demonstrated earlier in the same video.
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We in Britain and the US caused their dispossession. If they are not allowed to go back to their homes of thousands of years in Palestine, where would it be more just for them to go than to the homes of those who were instrumental in depriving them of their own?
And on the subject of "terroristic attitudes", let me tell you a story.
My father served in the British War Office during and after the Second World War. In his accounts of those times, he just took it as obvious that the term "the terrorists" referred to the Zionists, the people fighting to place Israel where Palestine had been, and not to the Palestinian Arabs. The Zionists killed Arabs wholesale, and also British and UN officials who got in the way of their campaign of terror. In particular they used terrorism to remove Arabs from areas the Zionists wanted to settle with Jews -- to ethnically cleanse them. (They invented the term. There were planning documents called, for instance, "The Cleansing of Galilee".)
When some Palestinians finally resorted to terrorism in the 1960s, almost a generation after their expulsion from their homeland of thousands of years, my father did not approve. But he did express surprise that it had taken them so long to emulate the methods -- or the heartlessness -- of their enemies.
For almost a generation they had waited for international law and UN Security Council resolutions to be applied, but they never were. In those days the stereotype of Palestinians was that they were pathetic ineffective wimps who deserved no respect. The usual line was "Well, the Palestinians don't really seem to care much about returning to their homes. They are just sitting there asking meekly, not getting up and fighting to do so."
But as soon as any of them got up and fought, using the only tools a dispossessed people have, the line changed to "You can't reward terrorism! They have lost all claim to returning now -- you can't expect the poor Jews to co-exist with people who have attacked them! You can't ever let terrorism win!"
Unless, of course, it is Israeli terrorism. Then it wins every time, though these days it doesn't even get called terrorism. Standards are never applied consistently. But double-standards are applied completely consistently.
When I told that story to another person who seemed to take a straightforwardly pro-Israeli, anti-Palestinian position, he said that the Palestinians should just forgive and forget what happened to them 75 years ago. (Presumably in the same way that the east European Zionists didn't forgive and forget what was done to their co-religionists eighteen centuries ago by the Romans, and used it to justify what they did to the Palestinians just 75 years ago. Incidentally, I say "co-religionists" rather than "ancestors" because it is now indisputable that the Palestinians actually have a far better claim to have the biblical Hebrews as ancestors than east European Jews have.) I'm going to copy what I said to him, slightly extended.
@Driver-ur9mf Not three generations ago. Starting three generations ago, and continuing from then till now and presumably until someone stops the monsters that do it. I used to follow the news from Palestine day by day and week by week, the humiliations, the arbitrary arrests, the killings, the stealing of personal property, the wanton destruction of what couldn't be stolen, the expropriation of land from Arabs to be given to Jews, the torture of children, the disappearances, the deliberate detention of ambulances at check-points so that the patient would die because they didn't get to hospital in time. And on and on and on. Children shot through the head at their school desks. Kids having their arms held out horizontally by soldiers so that another soldier could break them with rocks. The kids shot dead for playing football on the beach in Gaza. The peaceful protesters shot through the knees with special expanding bullets that require amputation above the knee to save the victim's life -- if it can be saved at all. (Look up the Haaretz article "'42 Knees in One Day': Israeli Snipers Open Up About Shooting Gaza Protesters". Haaretz is arguably Israel's leading news site.) The targetting of medics trying to help such people. The "one shot two kills" meme (celebrated on Israeli T-shirts) where the aim is to put a bullet through a pregnant Arab woman's belly, so as to get the stated effect. The Gaza fishermen who get shot up if an Israeli gunboat decides that they have crossed some arbitrary, invisible line just off the coast that their ancestors have fished for five thousand years. (The line separates that small fraction of the sea they are allowed into, the rest -- off Gaza as well as Israel -- being reserved for the immigrants.) The invasion, desecration and sometimes destruction of Christian and Muslim shrines, with the constant threat of the demolition of the al Aqsa mosque, the site from which Muhammad is supposed to have ascended into heaven, and the original centre of Islam. (For the first century or two, all mosques faced al Aqsa, not Mecca.) The habitual spitting on Christians and Muslims engaged in by certain Jewish sects. The mass taking of hostages (officially "administrative detainees") -- there are usually many thousands of people, including hundreds of children under arrest by the simple signature of a Jewish official. (The principle aim of the al Aqsa Flood operation was to gain hostages to exchange for these political prisoners.) Those hostages routinely get tortured, and sometimes killed by the Israelis -- a telling contrast to the stories of considerate and polite treatment told by Israeli hostages released by Hamas "terrorists".
After a while I couldn't take the horror any more, and stopped reading. It wasn't because the horrors stopped, it was because I was weak. I often could not sleep, out of anguish and shame over what was being done with the support of my country. I was damaging myself and my loved ones, and managing nothing to help those whose suffering was affecting me. So I just stopped, though it made me feel guilty. I had a colleague at work who kept me up to date with the running total of Palestinians killed by Israelis so far that year -- it was usually well into the hundreds. But I couldn't take the details any more.
You do not hear about the frequent horrors visited on the Palestinians because those who control the media in the West do not want you to -- they only want you to hear of the reaction that people driven beyond reason by this treatment occasionally manage to make towards those they (sometimes wrongly) think of as the perpetrators. But people in the Arab and Muslim world get to hear about it. That's part of the reason that those people sometimes appear "mad" to Westerners. They know things that you don't. Things that would probably make you mad too, if you knew that they were being done to your people, and the world was telling you that it didn't matter, and that you were the bad people for hating the people who were doing it.
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As with Russia-Ukraine, the Western media starts the story in the middle, just as the victim strikes back. It sounds like you don't know the back-story in either case, especially in the case of Israel-Palestine.
My father served in the British War Office during and after the Second World War. In his accounts of those times, he just took it as obvious that the term "the terrorists" referred to the Zionists, the people fighting to place Israel where Palestine had been, and not to the Palestinian Arabs. The Zionists killed Arabs wholesale, and also British and UN officials who got in the way of their campaign of terror. In particular they used terrorism to remove Arabs from areas the Zionists wanted to settle with Jews.
When some Palestinians resorted to terrorism in the 1960s, almost a generation after their expulsion from their homeland of thousands of years, my father did not approve. But he did express surprise that it had taken them so long to emulate the methods -- or the heartlessness -- of their enemies.
For almost a generation they had waited for international law and UN Security Council resolutions to be applied, but they never were. In those days the stereotype of Palestinians was that they were pathetic ineffective wimps who deserved no respect. The usual line was "Well, the Palestinians don't really seem to care much about returning to their homes. They are just sitting there asking meekly, not getting up and fighting to do so."
But as soon as any of them got up and fought, using the only tools a dispossessed people have, the line changed to "You can't reward terrorism! They have lost all claim to returning now -- you can't expect the poor Jews to co-exist with people who have attacked them! You can't ever let terrorism win!"
Unless, of course, it is Israeli terrorism. Then it wins every time, though these days it doesn't even get called terrorism. Standards are never applied consistently. But double-standards are applied completely consistently.
When I told that story to another person who seemed to take a straightforwardly pro-Israeli, anti-Palestinian position, he said that the Palestinians should just forgive and forget what happened to them 75 years ago. (Presumably in the same way that the east European Zionists didn't forgive and forget what was done to their co-religionists eighteen centuries ago by different people, and used it to justify what they did to the Palestinians just 75 years ago. I say co-religionists rather than ancestors because it is now indisputable that the Palestinians actually have a far better claim to be the direct descendants of the biblical Hebrews than east European Jews have.) I'm going to copy what I said to him, slightly extended.
@Driver-ur9mf Not three generations ago. Starting three generations ago, and continuing from then till now and presumably until someone stops the monsters that do it. I used to follow the news from Palestine day by day and week by week, the humiliations, the arbitrary arrests, the killings, the stealing of personal property, the wanton destruction of what couldn't be stolen, the expropriation of land from Arabs to be given to Jews, the torture of children, the disappearances, the deliberate detention of ambulances at check-points so that the patient would die because they didn't get to hospital in time. And on and on and on. Children shot through the head at their school desks. Kids having their arms held out horizontally by soldiers so that another soldier could break them with rocks. The kids shot dead for playing football on the beach in Gaza. The peaceful protesters shot through the knees with special expanding bullets that require amputation above the knee to save the victim's life -- if it can be saved at all. (Look up the Haaretz article "'42 Knees in One Day': Israeli Snipers Open Up About Shooting Gaza Protesters") The targetting of medics trying to help such people. The "one shot two kills" meme (celebrated on Israeli T-shirts) where the aim is to put a bullet through a pregnant Arab woman's belly, so as to get the stated effect. The mass taking of hostages (officially "administrative detainees") -- there are usually many thousands of people, including children under arrest by the simple signature of a Jewish official. (The principle aim of the al Aqsa Flood operation was to gain hostages to exchange for these political prisoners.) The Gaza fishermen who get shot up if an Israeli gunboat decides that they have crossed some arbitrary, invisible line just off the coast that their ancestors have fished for five thousand years. (The line separates that small fraction of the sea they are allowed into, the rest -- off Gaza as well as Israel -- being reserved for the immigrants.) The invasion, desecration and sometimes destruction of Christian and Muslim shrines, with the constant threat of the demolition of the al Aqsa mosque, the site from which Muhammad is supposed to have ascended into heaven, and the original centre of Islam. (For the first century or two, all mosques faced al Aqsa, not Mecca.) The habitual spitting on Christians and Muslims engaged in by certain Jewish sects. The variety of the cruelty and inhumanity was like something out of a Hieronymus Bosch depiction of Hell.
After a while I couldn't take the horror any more, and stopped reading. It wasn't because the horrors stopped, it was because I was weak. I often could not sleep, out of anguish and shame over what was being done with the support of my country. I was damaging myself and my loved ones, and managing nothing to help those whose suffering was affecting me. So I just stopped, though it made me feel guilty. I had a colleague at work who kept me up to date with the running total of Palestinians killed by Israelis so far that year -- it was usually well into the hundreds. But I couldn't take the details any more.
You do not hear about the frequent horrors visited on the Palestinians because those who control the media in the West do not want you to -- they only want you to hear of the reaction that people driven beyond reason by this treatment occasionally manage to make towards those they (sometimes wrongly) think of as the perpetrators. But people in the Arab and Muslim world get to hear about it. That's part of the reason that those people sometimes appear "mad" to Westerners. They know things that you don't. Things that would probably make you mad too, if you knew that they were being done to your people, and the world was telling you that it didn't matter, and that you were the bad people for hating the people who were doing it.
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@aucourant9998 You obviously know little about the background of al Qaeda and ISIS. Both were set up by America/UK/Israel.
"Al Qaeda" literally means "the (data-)base", named after a CIA database of potential jihadist fighters who could be used by America to overthrow the secular government of Afghanistan. That government, aided by the USSR, was giving that country what is still regarded by many Afghans who remember it as the country's "Golden Age". Money was being put into development, girls were being educated as well as boys, young women wore mini-skirts just like any Western girl. Of course, development out of control of the US had to be stopped, so the US recruited the most extreme obscurantist fundamentalists they could find from the Arab world to do the job. (Though they only managed it a few years after the Government's arms supplies dried up with the dissolution of the USSR.) The organisation (allegedly) turned against the US by 2001, giving the US government the excuse to give itself extraordinary war powers and to deprive its own citizens of many of their traditional rights and freedoms. Later it was again aligned with the USA in America's attempt to topple the legitimate government of Syria. The fictional "Moderate Rebels" that the USA financed and armed in Syria were actually the local branch of al Qaeda. They distinguished themselves by, among other things, beheading a Palestinian boy on video (for real, not a Rita Katz production) and cutting out and eating the heart of a Syrian soldier.
ISIS was designed to solve a problem that the USA had given itself after its second invasion of Iraq. Some idiot had not worked out that overthrowing Saddam Hussein's Sunni government and allowing elections would create a continuous "Shiite Crescent" extending from Iran to the Mediterranean, which would naturally gravitate to alignment with Iran. An openly published plan was developed -- I can't remember by which Washington think-tank -- to block the crescent with a "Sunni State" between Syria and Iraq. Strangely, a few years later, just such a Sunni State, called ISIS, was established in exactly the planned area by an organisation headed by Sunnis released from US custody in one particular detention centre, where they had been allowed to associate and plan. For a while ISIS worked well with the US and Israel; it fought the Syrian government, and occupyed the Syrian oil-fields so that stolen Syrian oil could be trucked to Turkey and then sent on to Israel. Obama protected the theft from interdiction by the Syrian government using American airpower, which also co-ordinated with ISIS attacks on government forces. Israel expressed a preference for ISIS winning the Syrian "civil war" (actually American intervention) and allowed ISIS fighters to withdraw into Israeli-controlled areas when hard pressed by Syrian forces. Wounded ISIS fighters were treated in Israeli hospitals before returning to the fight. There is video of some of them receiving curtousy bedside visits from senior Israeli officials. The pretense that ISIS was an independent terrorist organisation, rather than a collection of psychopaths put together by the Americans, had the extra advantage of giving America the excuse to invade Syria to pretend to fight them. Unfortunately, the Russians then intervened at Syria's request and fought the terrorists for real, and soon had them on the run. The US was forced to do the same, and ISIS control of Syrian land quickly dwindled. The US then had to occupy territory openly itself, which should have been embarassing, but because of American influence on most influential media, wasn't. Trump just announced that American troops would stay to "protect the [Syrian] oil" -- from the Syrians!
Now, Hamas has some similarities with al Qaeda and ISIS, in that it was originally set up by the Israelis for their own purposes. It broke the unity of the Palestinian movement, which was secular and attuned to moral principles of justice and self-determination that seemed sympathetic in the West, while an explicitly Islamic organisation would not have that advantage., It was also encouraged to be as uncompromising and extreme in its position as Israel itself was, so as to block any possibility of reaching any agreement on a 2-state solution, which would have required Israel to define its borders, rather than always aiming to expand. Careful observers said that Israel manipulated the situation to make it more likely for Hamas to win the election that brought them to power. According to leading Israeli news organisation Haaretz, Netanyahu told his party's Knesset members in March 2019 that "Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy." (Strangely, the West's policy of deplatforming supporters of "the Hamas terrorist organisation" has not been extended to Netanyahu.) Another sign of Hamas's dubious alighnment is the fact that it also fought to a limited extent on the American/Israeli side in the Syrian war.
On the other hand, Hamas recruits very differently from ISIS and al Qaeda. The latter vacuum up the very worst of society from a gigantic area spanning continents, and turn them into a vicious and frightening fighting force that can be moved around the world to attack America's targets and give the Americans the excuse to intervene openly. Hamas recruits more like Hezbollah, from a very geographically tight area, creating a militia that aims to protect the interests of the people of that area. Despite its origins, it does now seem to be a people's militia rather than an international terrorist group for hire. The proportion of psychopaths is therefore much lower than ISIS and AQ, and probably similar to that of Hezbollah and below that of Irgun and the Stern Gang and their successors. The question of who the leadership of Hamas is working for is very much open for debate.
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Might have been an idea not to dispossess, rape, murder, demolish, bulldoze, ethnically cleanse, mow the lawn and so and so on as soon as you arrived in the neighbourhood. Ah, well. That would require thinking of your neighbours as human beings rather than cattle. Or just thinking ahead -- did you really think that it was inconceivable that the balance of power might shift? Either humanity or intelligence would have done. You didn't even need both.
I hope the Palestinians don't eventually do to you what you did to them, and are doing to them right now. There are many good, humane Israelis who don't deserve it because they care about people in general, rather than just their own tribe. Perhaps you are one of them. But I think I must have read twenty or thirty of your posts by now, and it isn't coming across very clearly.
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