Bush quote on Hamas regarding platform to destroy a nation.

[Fire Walk With Me]

Bush questioned Hamas, saying that a political platform based upon destroying a nation is wrong.

Like Iraq!

Anyone got the soundbite to complete our Bizarro World evening?

[liberalhistorian]

1. I'm sorry, but there's a big difference

between what we're doing to Iraq and what Hamas wants to do, and has been attempting to do with horrendous consequences to innocent civilians, to Israel. Hamas wants Israel wiped off the map, it's that simple, and they're nothing more than a murderous terrorist organization that thinks nothing of destroying innocent Israeli lives. That's not to justify the occupation or any Israeli atrocities against Palestinians, but come on! Hamas is a TERRORIST organization that was formed solely to destroy Israel and to do it by any means possible, including murders of innocent civilians.

[bloom]

2. "horrendous consequences to innocent civilians"

huh?

You think we're doing something good in Iraq? You think we're not terrorizing that country?

I don't see that much difference.

[liberalhistorian]

3. There's a HUGE difference!

Most of the attacks on civilians in Iraq are carried out by insurgents attempting to drive us out so they can re-establish their own power. Now, I'm of the firm belief that we never should have been there in the first place and I think our continued presence is driving the insurgency, but that doesn't mean that our troops are responsible for the majority of civilian deaths. We don't send suicide bombers into crowded restaurants, office buildings, or busses like Hamas does. We don't blow up town squares to kill people enjoying a stroll with their families like Hamas does. We don't spend every waking moment planning ways to destroy the lives of as many civilians as we can like Hamas does. Your comparison is ludicrous.

[RC]

5. We just drop bombs on wedding parties,

shoot people because they sneeze, shoot children walking to school... You know, civilized stuff.

[bloom]

8. Our bombs are bigger

our planes and weapons more sophisticated. We look more authoritarian.

White Phosphorous burns. Have you seen the photos of those?

Have you seen the photos of Fallujah.

http://www.adnki.com/index_2Level.php?cat=Terrorism&loid=8.0.226404219&par=

Of Tal Afar.?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/05/middle_east_shooting_in_tal_afar/html/1.stm


Isn't Hamas trying to preserve what they have left of their country? Aren't the insurgents doing the same in Iraq?

What legitimate business do we have there?

[RC]

4. Ah, like Israel is an innocent victim. Has only gone after terrorists and

those that have broken the law?
Sure, I don't want what you're smoken, you can keep it.

[liberalhistorian]

6. If you will reread my post, I did NOT

say that Israel's actions against Palestinians were justified, or that they only went after terrorist, which they assuredly do not. I simply said that Hamas is a murderous terrorist organization that wants to wipe Israel totally off the map and was formed for the sole purpose of doing just that. Israel's atrocities do not justify Hamas's murderous terrorist acts. NOTHING justifies it. Israel has the right to exist and its citizens have the right to not be blown away while eating at a restaurant or riding a bus, just like Palestinians have the right to live free from a brutal occupation that has taken their dignity and far too many of their lives. Or do only Palestinian lives matter to you and not innocent Israeli lives?

[mike_c]

7. well, Hamas is more than simply a terrorist organization....

Hamas is a large charitable organization, and a social movement as well. As for the armed wing, one man's terrorism is another's fight against oppression. I think of Hamas as being very like the African National Congress in South Africa, with armed resistance, social, and political agendas all at the same time, and fighting an equally just struggle. In occupied Palestine they face tremendously uneven odds against the U.S. funded IDF, so they fight a guerilla war, much as the ANC was forced to do.

Finally, Hamas is now the majority party in the Palestinian parliament, by an open and democratic vote, and an unambiguous majority. They were the clear choice of the Palestinian people. I think it's time to show whether America really respects the democratic institutions it professes. Hamas represents the Palestinians.

:hi:

[liberalhistorian]

9. Mike, do

"charitable organization" send suicide bombers into crowded public places filled with civilians? I don't recall the ANC doing things like that.

:hi:

[mike_c]

10. well, in this instance they actually do....

The Wikipedia article (updated today, BTW!), which is incredibly one-sided in it's opposition to Hamas, does manage to get in this bit:

In addition to its paramilitary activities, Hamas funds a number of charitable activities, primarily in the Gaza Strip. These include religious institutions, medical facilities, and social needs of the area's residents. The work of Hamas in these fields is in addition to that provided by the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA). The charitable trust Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development was accused in December 2001 of funding Hamas.

Remember too that the U.S. has always targetted civilian populations during wartime, and MUCH more effectively than Hamas has ever dreamed of. Think Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. Pacification in Vietnam. Panama City. Fallujah. The Palestinians don't have the resources to carpet bomb from the air, so they sacrifice themselves carrying explosives on their bodies-- it's virtually the only tool of armed resistance they have. It's more effective than throwing themselves into a hail of IDF bullets at checkpoints. Remember that Palestine is for all intents and purposes a walled ghetto under both occupation and IDF lockdown.

on edit-- here's something relevant from the Hamas Charter:

Article Twenty: Social Solidarity
Islamic society is one of solidarity. The Messenger of Allah, be Allah’s prayer and peace upon him, said: What a wonderful tribe were the Ash’aris! When they were overtaxed, either in their location or during their journeys, they would collect all their possessions, and then would divide them equally among themselves. This is the Islamic spirit which ought to prevail in any Muslim society. A society which confronts a vicious, Nazi-like enemy, who does not differentiate between man and woman, elder and young ought to be the first to adorn itself with this Islamic spirit. Our enemy pursues the style of collective punishment of usurping people’s countries and properties, of pursuing them into their exiles and places of assembly. It has resorted to breaking bones, opening fire on women and children and the old, with or without reason, and to setting up detention camps where thousands upon thousands are interned in inhuman conditions. In addition, it destroys houses, renders children orphans and issues oppressive judgements against thousands of young people who spend the best years of their youth in the darkness of prisons. The Nazism of the Jews does not skip women and children, it scares everyone. They make war against people’s livelihood, plunder their moneys and threaten their honor. In their horrible actions they mistreat people like the most horrendous war criminals. Exiling people from their country is another way of killing them. As we face this misconduct, we have no escape from establishing social solidarity among the people, from confronting the enemy as one solid body, so that if one organ is hurt the rest of the body will respond with alertness and fervor.

Article Twenty-One
Social solidarity consists of extending help to all the needy, both materially and morally, or assisting in the execution of certain actions. It is incumbent upon the members of the Hamas to look after the interests of the masses the way they would look after their own interests. They must spare no effort in the implementation and maintenance of those interests, and they must avoid playing with anything that might effect the future generations or cause damage to their society. For the masses are of them and for them, their strength is theirs and their future is theirs. The members of Hamas must share with the people its joys and sorrows, and adopt the demands of the people and anything likely to fulfill its interests and theirs. When this spirit reigns, congeniality will deepen, cooperation and compassion will prevail, unity will firm up, and the ranks will be strengthened in the confrontation with the enemy.

[liberalhistorian]

11. In sacrificing themselves,

they also take many innocent lives with them, lives that are just as important and just as innocent as Palestinian lives. How is that justified by the fact that we have always targeted civilians in wartime (which we have, indeed, no doubt about that).

[mike_c]

12. not justified so much as made typical....

Now we're getting onto uncomfortable ground because I will not attempt to excuse the killing of innocents by anyone. I do feel that the Palestinians have few meaningful choices, however. They are under a murderous occupation and an imposed apartheid. Their oppressors are vastly more powerful. The west has largely turned its back on them. I'd like to say that they have other tactics at their disposal, but it's just not realistic, and if they do not fight, they would have been completely dispossessed by the Israelis decades ago. They must fight, but guerrilla tactics are the only ones available to them. I don't like it either, but I see it as a situation that Israel has created and imposed on the Palestinians, rather than one they would have chosen if they didn't have to.

[Colorado Blue]

13. I don't think Israel attacked 7 Arab states in 1948.

Wasn't it the other way around?

Violence against Jews in the Mandate began in the 1920's and has continued to this day. It predated the birth of Israel, let alone the 6 Day War, in which the West Bank was taken to prevent Israel's being overrun by Jordan. Even then, Dayan contacted Hussein and told him, if Jordan didn't attack the West Bank and Jordan wouldn't be touched.

But Jordan attacked.

Subsequent wars - Yom Kippur - the Lebanese Civil War - the intifadas - have taken a terrible toll on Israel. The Yom Kippur War, like the War of 1948, cost 1% of her population. Something like 1 in 5 Israelis have suffered loss from terror and war.

In American terms, 1% of the population would run into the millions.

There have been choices all along, peaceful choices, choices that would have encouraged openness, sharing, the richness of a multicultural society - which in fact HAS evolved within Israel and which could have shared by the people of the West Bank and Gaza as well. The "apartheid" is an artifact of the intifada. People used to drive freely back and forth, the economies were entertwined.

War, fear, hatred, xenophobia, violence and extremism: these are the enemies of us all. We MUST work, in spite of everything, for reconciliation and peace. But I don't know if that's possible in the worldview that sees only one set of rights in the Middle East: that of an Islamic megastate.

Other minorities besides the Jews are suffering: the Berber, Kurds, Copts, Maronite Christians, Assyrians. Christians and Animists in the Sudan have died - 2,000,000 of them - in recent years. Intolerance is the enemy, lack of reform is the enemy - not any one people or state.

Meanwhile, no serious regional solutions have been proposed to improve the economic conditions of the poor states in the area, those without oil, and certainly not those of the refugees from 1948 and their descendants - now some 4.5 million people. Israel absorbed the hundreds of thousands of Mizrachi and Sephardic Jews expelled from the Arab world after 1948, but the Palestinian refugees remain stateless, living in camps, unable to immigrate freely to other Arab lands. In Lebanon at least, they can't hold jobs, buy property. The only solution proposed on their behalf? Await the destruction of Israel.

This can't be right.

Doesn't it make more sense to recognize that this is 2006, not 1926, and that cooperation and mutual respect, stability and peace are vital for the welfare of people and the environment? The time for terror, for extremism, has long since passed and we should do everything in our power to discourage violent, radical solutions to our problems.

[mike_c]

14. do you recall the violence against Palistinians by Haganah, Irgun, and...

...Lehi before the state of Israel was founded, and the massacres, land seizures, and dispossessions afterward? The Deir Yassin massacre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin_massacre)? The Nakba (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_exodus)? I think many Americans simply don't know where the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lie.

From Wikipedia:

As David Ben Gurion admitted to the Jewish Agency in regard to stopping the upsurge in Jewish terrorism in Palestine: "We cannot do it because, as I told you, it is futile, sir, it is futile."

Remember haganah's Plan Dalet?

In Section 3b the plan describes how to deal with occupied "enemy population centers": (This refers to Palestinian villages-- MC)

Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously. ... Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.

[Colorado Blue]

15. By the time those incidents occured, the damage was done.

Dier Yassin was 1948 - decades after the violence began. It was a terrible thing - nobody will deny that. However, it was one of many terrible things that happened during that war - and it was brutally avenged. And nor did the Arabs have to flee. Why didn't they take Ben Gurion at his word and stay, and help build the new state? Nobody even gave it a chance.

But once the war started, it was total, it was existential, and there was no place for the Israelis to go. Many had just gotten off the boats, some from illegal blockade runners: survivors of the Holocaust, whom nobody wanted. They were the living dead, unable to speak Hebrew, or even figure out how to work their guns. Others were sabra, native born, sons and daughters of indigenous families. Women fought. They would have fought to the last child - because they had no choice.

None of this had to happen.

Have you studied al Husseini? He was a prototype for Hamas, and a mentor of Arafat. Why the Brits ever appointed him to "lead" the Palestinian Arabs I'll never know. It was against the advice of other Arabs; he wasn't a sheik; he'd been jailed. Maybe they wanted the Mandate to fail, to be weak, not to threaten the hegemony of the Empire. Certainly, that would have fit their pattern of divide and conquer: The Great Game.

Husseini was a disaster. Riots, murders followed in his wake - in the Mandate, in Iraq. He wound up working for the Reich, and he was in Lebanon, in 1948, helping direct the war against Israel. He promised to finish the job in the Middle East, that Hitler had started in Europe.

There are layers and layers to this story, layers and layers of pain. It hasn't affected only one side. And "truth" can't be seen from only one angle.

It is also good to study the correspondence between the Emir Faisal and Felix Frankfurter, and also with Chaim Weitzmann. There was such hope for the future, such a vision of cooperation between these brothers, Arabs and Jews, for what could be built; but also a darkening realization that there were people all too eager to exploit the differences between them, and between the modern and the old, the East and the West.

I don't know why the Left, which deplores xenophobia in the West, and preaches about cultural diversity and acceptance of "the other", can't see that it is also important in the East, and that is, was and has been lacking, and that it's certainly a factor in the problems we see today - not just in Israel/P.A., but throughout the region. The Berber, the Copts, the Maronites, the Kurds, the Assyrians, minor Islamic sects - many minorities are under pressure. In the Sudan, 2,000,000 Christian and Animist Africans have died, just in the past few years.

In the early 20th century, as many as 1,000,000 Armenians were murdered. In 1917, 700,000 Assyrians were killed. In 1920, Greece invaded Turkey, at the instigation of the British. In 1922, they were expelled, all Greek speaking residents of Turkey banished and their ancient cities in Asia Minor, burned. The Greeks retaliated in kind: Turks were banished, and Cypress remains a site of potential disaster to this day. There too, trouble has been fomented - juntas in Greece, rebellions on Cypress: footholds for the West in this so-strategic region.

Trying to lay all the blame for the intifada, for the Palestinian situation, on Dier Yassin, in the face of this broader, longer-range perspective, just won't help. And regardless of Israeli crimes before and during the War of Independence, their situation was critical and dire and their actions arose from the brutality that they faced. Can you imagine what would have happened, had they failed?

I'm reading a book now, "The Battle for Jerusalem," by Shlomo Shamir, the commander of the 7th Brigade. The city, stranded beyond the partition lines, was starving, bombed, under fierce attack - 100,000 Jews cut off from the coastal plain. The Brits assumed the city would fall in 2 weeks, the rest of the young nation, it was assumed, would die soon thereafter.

Were 600,000 lives to be written off so lightly? Apparently, they were. The Arab leaders certainly promised this.

Let's not encourage people to reenter this terrible cycle. We on the Left must stand for progress and for hope, not for reactionary violence and endless revenge. And we have to work with the damaged material we've inherited, and do our best, not to exacerbate and inflame old wounds, but to heal them.

[mike_c]

16. thanks for the thoughtful and detailed reply....

I suspect we agree more than you might think. There is much to discuss here, and not enough time. I think the most important point is that it IS a complex, layered issue, and that its roots-- and ultimately its resolution, if there ever is one-- are buried in the cultural divide between the Arab Palestinians and the Zionists. Peace will likewise only arise from those disparate cultures, or from their mutual exhaustion. But it is too frequently simplified to "terrorists blowing up innocent civilians."

Shalom.

[barb162]

18. I could have sworn the Rafah/Egypt border crossing was open

"...walled ghetto under both occupation and IDF lockdown"



Your comments are next to absurb in the context of World War 2. WHen you warn a country to surrender and that you're going to bomb a city and they don't surrender and let another of their cities be wiped out, that's what I call a Japanese leadership problem.... Remember what the Japanese did to China, our war prisoners, etc? The Japanese Killed about 20 million people in China alone , they did 12/7/41, etc. Funny how you bring up an anti-US rant in the context of WW2 against an enemy who attacked us. On and on with some of this stuff dredged up from 60 years ago. Fallujans were warned too Was that something to be proud of... what happened there? No. It was war. But ask the insurgents why they hide behind others.

Also how many suicide bombings does Hamas have to do before you decide it is a bona fide terror group.

[Egalitariat]

19. You're about to get some of the most moronic posts ever posted here*****

nm

[tirechewer]

17. I don't have a sound bite....

But I have an opinion. I think Bush and his actions and policies in the Mideast are partially responsible for the results of this election. He has threatened virtually every country there with invasion if they don't do as he wishes. They see what he's doing in Iraq and they believe him. Heck, I believe him. He's barking crazy.

He is the one that kept pushing for the Palestinian elections. They had to have an independent state all done and set in place by 2007, he said. With his kid of government, on his terms. Funny how that works. You scare people to death and then bully them enough and they will turn to what makes them feel safe. I think there was a feeling that Fatah belonged to Bush. The people who voted against it, didn't want to belong to Bush themselves. I don't agree with their choice, but I realize it isn't up to us to make it for them.

[Fire Walk With Me]

20. This seems to be the one thing BushCo didn't want to happen

or predict.

When you smash around the world taking what you want, others might just stand up and say "I can do that too! It's time for MY opinion."

Unfortunately, these days, most opinions are utterly selfish. The republicans want to be the only power group in the country, to beyond "king and queen" levels, the ultraChristians want theirs to be the only remaining beliefs, and thus, remain unquestioned and not having to question or choose, countries are rising against one another...

Antics ensue. Who could have known? ;-)

[tirechewer]

21. That's very true....

I know how serious the situation is for an already volatile mideast, but when I heard the results of the election I thought, "Aha, looks like Bush is going to have to negotiate with terrorists after all.";)

Now he's threatening to cut off the US funding to the Palestinians because of Hamas. Really bright move. Now they can turn to Iran for funding and support and turn further away from us. With all of the oil money that Iran has to spend, does he really think he can intimidate them into anything. But then think and Bush are oxymorons. Except for the time when Bush is just a plain moron.