Role Play

Apart from the dead, 5,300 Palestinians were wounded during the Israeli campaign. Many of the 1.5 million people in the Gaza Strip have seen their homes and other property blown to pieces.

“We want a solution that would guarantee Israeli tanks will not return to kill us,” said Yehya Aziz, 28. “They said a ceasefire for a week. I don’t feel good, I doubt it is over.”

Israeli soldiers have been withdrawing from Gaza, leaving scenes of devastation and what Palestinians see as desecration.

Graffiti scrawled inside a mosque in the battered Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City read “Hamas whores” in Hebrew and “Hamas is dead” in English. Discarded military rations littered the floor. A shell hole gaped in one wall. (Source)

Suppose Israel were a small coastal strip approximately 4-5 miles long. Suppose a radical Arab nationalist state called Palestine whose area was approximately 21,000 square kilometers bordered it on three sides. Suppose this fictitious Palestine tightly controlled the border of Israel.

The Unlimited Rights of the Holy States

Israeli forces shelled areas deep inside Gaza City on Thursday, hitting the headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and injuring at least three people among the hundreds taking shelter in the compound, according to United Nations officials and witnesses.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel expressed regret for the strike but said that Israeli forces were fired on by Hamas militants from just outside the United Nations compound and then ran inside to take cover, according to Mr. Olmert’s spokesman, Mark Regev. “It is absolutely true that we were attacked from that place,” Mr. Olmert said in broadcast remarks, according to Reuters. (Source)

So if Gazans, inside Gaza, attack Israelis who are illegally invading their country and slaughtering civilians by the thousands, the Israeli’s claim the right to destroy any and all buildings from which the resistance is launched, even if it’s a U.N. compound where innocent Gazans are taking refuge and where international aid workers are attempting to help the thousands of victims.

Solidarity with Gaza

Dr. Bob Fitrakis

Anti-Voter Legislation in the Works, Again!

Length: 5:38

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Selective Attention

Necessary Narratives

It’s a familiar narrative – Palestinians are unreasonable and violent – Israel is forethought, peaceful, and violent only as a last resort against their impossibly aggressive neighbors.  How accurate a portrayal is the official mass media narrative?  Why haven’t any of the mainstream media accounts linked the fact that Israel continues to violate international consensus regarding Jerusalem and the 1967 borders with the Hamas rocket fire?

Today I heard Sean Hannity’s guest radio host (Curtis Sliwa) discussing the Israeli violence with such contempt for the rules of inference that he attempted to demonize Palestinians by pointing to the suicide bomber in Afghanistan that killed 14 children this week.  That in and of itself wouldn’t be so bad, but when you consider the fact that back in September a U.S. air-strike hit a school and killed maybe 100 women and children, or that in November a U.S. air-strike hit a wedding party and killed 40 innocent people, you have to conclude that Curtis Sliwa reasons slightly better than a chimpanzee but not quite as well as a human child.

Domination vs. Co-Existence

Gazan militants are not firing rockets into Israel because they are irrational and violent, at least not in every case. Further, not every rocket fired comes from an organized Hamas effort.

Militants are firing rockets into Israel because of the virtual stranglehold imposed unto the unoffending civilian population of Gaza ever since the 2006 parliamentary elections; the building of the annexation wall in the West Bank, Israeli government policies of constant expansion and totalitarian control of the Palestinian territories with particular regard to the water resources, Israeli policies of blockading U.N. aid workers and shipments from entering Gaza going back to 2006, which 750,000 Gazans depend upon for nutrition, most of them children, are policies that are designed specifically to elicit a Hamas militant response, which as we can demonstrate, may amount to some destroyed buildings and the occasional dead Israeli.

If the Israeli government were truly interested in stopping this, it would address the very serious and very rational motives for the Hamas rocket-fire, but to think that Israel wants the rocket fire to end is to miss the point entirely.