And here is the [URL="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7838465.stm"]BBC[/URL].

and an Arab reporter in a English language newspaper that you probably don't like reports on the [URL="http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1232292907998&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull"]slaughter[/URL] too.

[quote=tha;159719]And here is the [URL="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7838465.stm"]BBC[/URL].

and an Arab reporter in a English language newspaper that you probably don't like reports on the [URL="http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1232292907998&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull"]slaughter[/URL] too.[/quote]

tha: Did you read the BBC story you linked? Please do it again before reading the rest of my response.

I can't read Arabic so I will have to pass on Al Hayat. I would be [B]very[/B] wary of giving credibility to the JPost. If it appeared in the Haaretz, I would be more convinced.

The BBC article you link has a completely different story of how a Palestinian fertility doctor who used to treat Israeli women had his daughters murdered by the Israeli Army while he was on the phone to an Israeli TV station. Nothing about Hamas there. So please give me another link from the BBC.

On the other hand, I saw a report on the BBC last night where one of their reporters in Gaza researched a story in which two young girls were allegedly deliberately shot by an Israeli soldier. He interviewed three separate people in Gaza and Egypt - who were not in contact with each other and thus could not have fabricated evidence - and they all said the same thing. It was slow and deliberate. Here is the link [URL]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7843430.stm[/URL] It is also on the right hand side of the story you linked.

Here are some links from Haaretz, an Israeli paper.

How IDF legal experts legitimized strikes involving Gaza civilians
[URL]http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1057648.html[/URL]

and an opinion piece :
Gideon Levy / Gaza war ended in utter failure for Israel
[URL]http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1057670.html[/URL]

[quote]Most of the smuggling that is going on is meant to provide food for a population under siege, and not to obtain weapons. But even if we accept the scare campaign concerning the smuggling with its exaggerations, this war has served to prove that only poor quality, rudimentary weapons passed through the smuggling tunnels connecting the Gaza Strip to Egypt.
[/quote]

[QUOTE]Israel's actions have dealt a serious blow to public support for the state. While this does not always translate itself into an immediate diplomatic situation, the shockwaves will arrive one day. The whole world saw the images. They shocked every human being who saw them, even if they left most Israelis cold.

The conclusion is that Israel is a violent and dangerous country, devoid of all restraints and blatantly ignoring the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council, while not giving a hoot about international law. The investigations are on their way. [/QUOTE]

The correct link to the article I described is this [URL="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7837356.stm"]BBC article[/URL]. The other link is to another article I had read in the same run. Since Israel had each and every reason not to hurt the Palestinian obstetrician, who indeed is popular in Israel, and has also contributed a lot to Israels interests in international affairs, I have good reasons to believe this is not an accident. I suspect deliberate fire from the immediate vicinity of his house during the TV interview. By those who oppose his cooperation with the Israeli's of course.

In the article you linked, there is one mention of a person's legs being shot. Hardly a slaughter and definitely not the torture and the pulling out of eyes you claimed.

Also from the article you linked:
[quote]The issue is not Hamas. This military operation was against the Palestinian people. Today Hamas said that just 48 of them have been killed.
I don't need to believe Hamas, I can see facts with my own eyes in the hospitals.
I'm not afraid to talk about Hamas. Last year we [the non-governmental organisation] took a position criticising Hamas for violating human rights. We oppose any violation, whether it's from Hamas or anyone else, we do not keep silent.[/quote]This is my position too. [B]Except tha continues to bury his head in the sand and supports human rights violations from the Israeli side.[/B]

Going back to the story of the doctor, assuming what tha says is correct and someone fired from the vicinity - which is contradicted by testimony from the doctor - why did the Israeli Army lob a shell into the doctor's house killing his daughters anyway? Weren't they supposed to be firing at the aggressor. Do they not have a duty according to international law to protect civilians? The answer is simply because they don't care about civilian casualties and their objective is to make the Palestinian people suffer as much as possible in an attempt to make them reject Hamas. Well, they have failed because violence always fails.

Please watch the video I linked in my previous post. Though I doubt any of that will make tha change his mind just as Bush and Blair continued to insist that WMDs will be found in Iraq for almost a year after the invasion.

[QUOTE=garo;159845] Well, they have failed because violence always fails.
[/QUOTE]

Always?

[quote=garo;159828]How IDF legal experts legitimized strikes involving Gaza civilians
[URL]http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1057648.html[/URL][/quote]
This is wery disturbing. Not only do they not care about what is legal or not, but it is their only concern. Israel don't have any moral limits. If it's not illegal they will do it, and if it is illegal they will do it anyway. Israel should start worrying about their own [URL="http://mwcnews.net/content/view/27972/264/"]image[/URL].

Thanks for the link Sturle. Truly shocking and the comparison is eerie.

[quote=masser;159879]Always?[/quote]

Ok, not always, usually. It only succeeds when it more or less exterminates a people. Look at the European colonization of North America and Australia for examples of violence succeeding.

On another note, a blistering polemic from John Pilger. You may find his style abrasive but there is substance in his words.

[quote][B]Come On Down For Your Freedom Medals[/B]
Jan 22, 2009 By [B]John Pilger[/B]
[URL="http://www.zmag.org/zspace/johnpilger"]John Pilger's ZSpace Page[/URL] / [URL="http://www.zmag.org/zspace"]ZSpace[/URL]

[FONT=Verdana][SIZE=2]On 13 January, George W. Bush presented "presidential freedom medals", said to be America's highest recognition of devotion to freedom and peace. Among the recipients were Tony Blair, the epic liar who, with Bush, bears responsibility for the physical, social and cultural destruction of an entire nation; John Howard, the former prime minister of Australia and minor American vassal who led the most openly racist government in his country's modern era; and Alvaro Uribe, the president of Colombia, whose government, according the latest study of that murderous state, is "responsible for than 90 per cent of all cases of torture".[/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana][SIZE=2]
As satire was made redundant when Henry Kissinger and Rupert Murdoch were honoured for their contributions to the betterment of humanity, Bush's ceremony was, at least, telling of a system of which he and his freshly-minted successor are products. Although more spectacular in its choreographed histrionics, Barack Obama's inauguration carried the same Orwellian message of inverted truth: of ruthlessness of criminal power, if not unending war. The continuity between the two administrations has been as seamless as the transfer of the odious Bono's allegiance, symbolised by President Obama's oath-taking on the steps of Congress - where, only days earlier, the House of Representatives, dominated by the new president's party, the Democrats, voted 390-5 to back Israel's massacres in Gaza. The supply of American weapons used in the massacres was authorised previously by such a margin. These included the Hellfire missile which sucks the air out of lungs, ruptures livers and amputates arms and legs without the necessity of shrapnel: a "major advance", according to the specialist literature. As a senator, then president-elect, Obama raised no objection to these state-of-the-art [sic] weapons being rushed to Israel - worth $22 billion in 2008 - in time for the long-planned assault on Gaza's fenced and helpless population. This is understandable; it how the system works. On no other issue does Congress and the president, Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, give such absolute support. By comparison, the German Reichstag in the 1930s was a treasure of democratic and principled debate. [/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana][SIZE=2]
This is not to say presidents and members of Congress fail to recognise the Israel "lobbyists" in their midst as thugs and political blackmailers, though they never say in public, and indeed disport themselves at Zionist fund-raisers and on paid-for trips to the object of their ardour. But they fear them. As eyes welled on 20 January for the first African-American president, who remembered Cynthia McKinney, the courageous African-American Congresswoman, the first to be elected from Georgia, who spoke out for the Palestinians and was duly driven from office by a Zionist smear campaign? For their part, the Israelis' current, phoney "unilateral ceasefire" in Gaza is designed not to embarrass, not yet, its new man in the White House, whose single acknowledgement of the "suffering" of the Palestinians has been long eclipsed by his loyalty oaths to Tel Aviv (even promising Jerusalem as Israel's capital, which not even Bush did) and his appointment of probably the most pro-Zionist administration for a generation.[/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana][SIZE=2]
As deserving as Blair, Howard and Uribe are of the Bush Freedom Medal, others cry out for a place in their company. With the assault on Gaza a defining moment of truth and lies, principle and cowardice, peace and war, justice and injustice, I have two nominees. My first is the government and society of Israel. (I checked; the Freedom Medal can be awarded collectively). "Few of us," wrote Arthur Miller, "can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied." [/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana][SIZE=2]The bleak irony of this should be clear to all in Israel, yet its denial has emboldened a militarist, racist cult that uses every epithet against the Palestinians that was once directed at Jews, with the exception of extermination - and even that is not entirely excluded, as the deputy defence minister, Matan Vilinai, noted last year with his threat of a shoa (holocaust). [/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana][SIZE=2]
In 1948, the year Israel's right to exist was granted and Palestine's annulled, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and other leading Jews in the United States warned the administration not to get involved with fascists like Menachem Begin who described the Palestinians in the way the Nazis used untermenchen - as "animals on two legs". He became prime minister of Israel. This fascism, which was not often flouted openly, was the harbinger of Likud and Kadima. These are today "mainstream" political parties, whose influence, in the treatment of the Palestinians, covers a national "consensus" that is the source of the terror in Palestine: the brutal dispossessions and perfidious controls, the humiliation and cruelty by statute. The mirror of this is domestic violence at home. Conscripted soldiers return from their "war" on Palestinian women and children and make war on their own. Young whites drafted into South Africa's apartheid army did the same. Inhumanity on such a scale cannot be buried indefinitely. When Desmond Tutu described his experience in Palestine and Israel as "worse than apartheid", he pointed out that not even in white supremacist South Africa were there the equivalent of "Jews only" roads. Uri Avnery, one of Israel's bravest dissidents, says his country's leaders suffer from "moral insanity": a prerequisite, I should add, for the award of a Bush Freedom Medal. [/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana][SIZE=2]
My other nominee for a Bush Freedom Medal is that amorphous group known as western journalism, which has always made much of its freedom and impartiality. Listen to the way Israeli "spokespersons" and ambassadors are interviewed. How respectfully their official lies are received; how minimally they are challenged. They are one of us, you see: calm and western-sounding, even blonde, female and attractive. The frightened, jabbering voice on the line from Gaza is not one of us. That is the subliminal message. Listen to newsreaders use only the pejoratives for the Palestinians: words like "militants" for resisters to invasion, many of them heroes, a word never used, and "conflict" for massacre. Mark the timeless propaganda that suggests there are two equal powers fighting a "war", not a stricken people, attacked and starved by the world's fourth largest military power which ensures they have no places of refuge. And note the omissions -- the BBC does not preface its reports with the warning that a foreign power controls its reporters' movements, as it did in Serbia and Argentina, neither does it explain why it shows but glimpses of the extraordinary coverage of al-Jazeera from within Gaza. [/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana][SIZE=2]
There are the ubiquitous myths, too: that Israel has suffered terribly from thousands of missiles fired from Gaza. In truth, the first homemade Qassam rocket was fired across the Israeli border in October 2001, and the first fatality occurred in June 2004. Some 24 Israelis had been killed in this way, compared with 5000 Palestinians killed, more than half of them in Gaza, at least a third of them children. Now imagine if the 1.5 million Gazans had been Jewish, or Kosovar refugees. "The only honorable course for Europe and America is to use military force to try to try to protect the people of Kosovo ...," declared the Guardian on 23 March, 1999. Inexplicably, the Guardian has yet to call for such "an honorable course" to protect the people of Gaza.[/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana][SIZE=2]Such is the rule of acceptable victims and unacceptable victims. When reporters break this rule they are accused of "anti-Israel bias" and worse, and their life is made a misery by a hyperactive cyber-army that drafts complaints, provides generic material and coaches people all over the world on how to smear as "anti-Jewish" work they have not seen. These vociferous campaigns are complemented by anonymous death threats, which I and others have experienced. Their latest tactic is malicious hacking into websites. But that is desperate, since the times are changing. [/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana][SIZE=2]
Across the world, people once indifferent to the arcane "conflict" in the Middle East, now ask the question the BBC and CNN rarely ask: Why does Israel have a right to exist, but Palestine does not? They ask, too, why do the lawless enjoy such immunity in the pristine world of balance and objectivity? The perfectly-spoken Israeli "spokesman" represents the most lawless regime on earth, exotic tyrannies included, according to a tally of United Nations resolutions defied and Geneva Conventions defiled. In France, 80 organisations are working to bring war crimes indictments against Israel's leaders. On 15 January, the fine Israeli reporter, Gideon Levy, wrote in Ha'aretz that Israeli generals "will not be the only ones to hide in El Al planes lest they are arrested [overseas]". [/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana][SIZE=2]
One day, other journalists and their editors and producers may be called upon to not only explain why they did not tell the truth about these criminals but even to stand in the dock with them. No Bush Freedom Medal is worth that. [/SIZE][/FONT]
[URL="http://www.johnpilger.com/"][FONT=Verdana][SIZE=2]www.johnpilger.com[/SIZE][/FONT][/URL]
[/quote]

[QUOTE=garo;160005]Ok, not always, usually. It only succeeds when it more or less exterminates a people. Look at the European colonization of North America and Australia for examples of violence succeeding.[/QUOTE]Only? Please explain how the experience of Germany and of Japan in the mid-20th century is consistent with that statement.

Another example which would appear to fit your model: Carthage.


Paul

[quote=xilman;160235]Only? Please explain how the experience of Germany and of Japan in the mid-20th century is consistent with that statement.[/quote]
Both Germany and Japan needed powerful friends who could protect them against a terrible enemy right next to them. Remember that Stalin took about 2/3 of East Germany after WWII, expelling all Germans there from their own land. 1/3 for Russia (East Preussia), the rest for Poland (after also taking a large piece of eastern Poland, so he effectively moved Poland to the west).

When Stalin tried to starve West Berlin, the western powers came to rescue with the Berlin Air Lift. A gigantic operation, where the two million people in West Berlin got all their supplies flown in by air. More than 1000 transport planes each day when the weather allowed it.

I don't know much about Japan after the war, but Japan as well became victims for Stalin's hunger for land. The dispute over South Kuril Islands is not yet solved.

Compare this to Gaza, and it is easy to see who "Stalin" is and who their friends are and are not.

[quote=xilman;160235]Only? Please explain how the experience of Germany and of Japan in the mid-20th century is consistent with that statement.

Another example which would appear to fit your model: Carthage.

Paul[/quote]

Alright, Alright! Not "only". I should know better than to use generalizations. Generally speaking, they are a bad idea.

Germany and Japan are an interesting case study since they set out to achieve their aims by violence but eventually failed. Unless of course their aim was to destroy their own countries and kill lots of people in which case they succeeded admirably. On the other hand, the victorious Allies did achieve their goals through violence though one must say that the violence was thrust upon them. And they did try to negotiate with the aggressors for years before hand without any success.