Again - "anti-terrorists" have now declared civilians "legitimate targets"

[Leopolds Ghost]

Mods -- I did NOT post the following as flamebait. In fact, I posted it before the original thread was locked, and for good reason.

"anti-terrorists" declare civilians "legitimate targets"
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1697324

My original motive for posting was a quote from the Israeli Foreign Minister. I merely cited a post in one of the Hezbollah threads as a close-to-home example of a view that's widely shared by alot of Americans (in a thread which should not have been locked anyhow -- it was a productive discussion.)

It's not just here on the Internet. Here's my original example: The Foreign Minister of Israel went out of her way to tell NYTimes reporters that:

"it's unfortunate that the civilian population, which protects Hezbollah, must be targeted for their actions."

And according to Newsweek, the destruction in Beirut -- which is comparable to 9/11 from any kind of religious, moral perspective -- is purely the fault of IRAN and merely a prelude to Iran getting nukes, no less (unless we stop them.) According to Newsweek, that is...

This is the SECOND time I've been alerted for posting an inconvenient
truth that I didn't even think was controversial when I posted it!

KILLING CIVILIANS IS A CRIME -- Period.

What is wrong with this society?

[atreides1]

1. Some on DU aren't so Democratic

Thanks from someone who believes like you that the entire truth needs to be told, not just the sugar coated version that makes people feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

[Leopolds Ghost]

2. We can't isolate groups that depend on hatred if we behave like them.

Even Hamas and the Mahdi Army, once they placed themselves within the existing power structure similar to Hezbollah, Israel / US found themselves prepared to deal with on some level. Unless there is an ongoing genocide like in the case of Hitler, or a band of savages whose goal is to kill as many civilians as possible like Al Qaeda, it IS possible to adress the source of terrorism without becoming terrorists (and creating new ones on the other side).

Look at the blowback that's happened when the US abandoned the carefully cultivated image of moderation and openness that it adopted (deliberately, as a national defense mechanism against communism) after WWII. The people who held the Nuremberg Trials knew that once you let that genie out of the bottle, once you get down and dirty with people who have a history of being vicious to each other, there's nothing stopping those groups from turning their viciousness on us... which they previously had no reason to do.

[DELUSIONAL]

3. The villains are bush/cheney/rummy & the Neocons

They want us to fight with each other.

This is the war they wanted -- and have planned for.

It is not surprising that the Foreign minister of Israel is as stupid sounding as the the US. Civilians in Iraq are disposable -- who cares -- no body count is being kept. They don't count.

[Leopolds Ghost]

7. No one talks about the party Sharon started and what exactly

their aims are. They seem like the Israeli version of Republican neocons to me. Just like the Republican party in the 1980s, they pretend to be "moderates" restoring "happy days" to the country. The peaceniks are the "real radicals". Ehud Olmert, one of the richest men in Israel, whose main ambition seems to be popularity, similar to whats his name in Italy. As Bush proved, war brings popularity.

PEace negotiations brings problems and aloss of face when the other side fails to keep the terms. Classic prisoner's dillemma. Never mind that just as many people die "unnobly" from terrorist bombs that succeed in their mission -- disrupting protracted peace negotiations -- as die "nobly" during needless full-scale military conflict.

[tocqueville]

4. facts talk for themselves

The World Health Organization said 600,000 people have been displaced by the hostilities. Lebanese Finance Minister Jihad Azour said close to 750,000 had fled their homes, nearly 20 percent of Lebanon's 4 million people.

The U.N. refugee agency was building up stocks of relief supplies in Syria in hopes of getting safe passage to reach displaced Lebanese in the mountains north of Beirut. It moved 500 tents, 20,000 mattresses and 20,000 blankets by convoy from Amman, Jordan, to Damascus on Friday and planned to move more supplies the same way Monday.

It reported that many of the 80,000 displaced people in the Aley region north of Beirut were living in schools and food stocks there were running low.

"People are traumatized and anxious. The conditions are very precarious," said Arafat Jamal, UNHCR's top official in Lebanon. "There's a lot of overcrowding, with people sleeping three families to a room and tremendous pressure on the sanitation facilities."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060723/ap_on_re_mi_ea/mideast_fighting_un;_ylt=AmaTBOusROGSbycYqDzcjq_GK7IF;_ylu=X3oDMTBjMHVqMTQ4BHNlYwN5bnN1YmNhdA--

what some people don't understand is that the US/Israel are practically completely isolated on this issue. The anger is so big in the Arab world that governments of countries like Egypt, Jordan are seen as traitors by the Arab street. Israel is turning Iran and the Hezbollah into heroes where they weren't. And that's not good for tomorrow...

[oberliner]

5. Please don't make up fake quotes

Do you have a link for that quote?

Maybe the alert is for misquoting people.

[Leopolds Ghost]

9. I don't have access to the NYTimes website. It's on A1 several

days ago, possibly below the fold, in an article with a sub-title something like "ground invasion expected to be short-lived" I read it on paper (imagine that) and wrote it down, so you'll have to look it up for yourself.

It got NO play in the article or elsewhere (the reporter barely even touched on loss of civilian life, or the fact that Lebanese civilians are dying to a 10:1 ratio over Israeli -- probably more, since Israeli foriegn policy, like the US, is pretty explicit in valing the lives of our citizens so highly over the lives of foreigners that it begins to verge on territory not seen since the days of tribal warfare.)

[Bluerthanblue]

6. Why is it that if a person took several civilian hostages...

and barricaded themselves in a building ,the authorities would do EVERYTHING in their power to get the hostages out safely-????

If the rationale is that terrorists hide among civilians, why aren't those civilians given the same value as hostages???

Don't mean this to confuse your post- but I heard the statement you quote on the news this evening, and I turned to my son and said
"Why do the police work to free hostages that are being held by gunmen, negotiating, and doing everything they can to save innocent lives? "
The civilian population can't help being in the land of Lebanon, and the implication that their existence is PROTECTION- as if they were taking conscious actions that they knew would benefit Hezbollah, is not only unfair- it is callous denial of the value of human life.

Shame on anyone who excuses the premeditated murder of civilians without batting an eye- and then blaming THEM for their own deaths.

[blonndee]

8. I made that comparison the other day, too.

I referred to SWAT doing everything possible to prevent other "civilians" as well as their own from being hurt or killed, as opposed to opening fire on a neighborhood or dropping explosives and taking out an entire block. Another poster pointed out that not only is that the RIGHT thing to do, but also that such action also prevents the outcry and potential violence that would understandably ensue if police were to engage in such reckless behavior.

The defending and justifying that's going on these days...it's just mind-boggling.

[Leopolds Ghost]

11. I guess if they don't turn on their neighbors and murder them,

They're "protecting" them. Never mind all that BS about loving thy neighbor, which Jesus and the Reform Jews invented and exported to other countries; doesn't apply back home.

Of course, christians (Maronites) and shiites (Hezbollah) have been killing each other in Lebanon for quite some time now, what more can you ask for in terms of "not sheltering" Hezbollah? Maybe they deserve to be bombed because the Lebanese civil war ended, proving that Lebanese were "soft on shi'ism".

[The_Casual_Observer]

17. How about the value of the life of a little white american kid that

fall into a well, or a blond babe who turns up missing. Apparently their lives are worth something, anonymous brown people in the ME are worth shit

[Kajsa]

10. Just how have they ( Israeli gov.) determined that

Lebanese children and the elderly, along with wounded civilians
on their way to get medical attention are " protecting Hezbollah" ?

They are all victims of the bombing. The last group were targeted.

[ConservativeDemocrat]

12. So long as anti-semites label Hezboallah terrorists "civilians"...

...that will be the case.

Again, just because you are unarmed, it doesn't make you a civilian. If you willingly participate in a war effort - trucking or storing rockets bombs, providing material support to friendly fighters, or even such "innocent" things as passing along military information (spying) - you can be legally targeted as an enemy combatant - because you are.

Insofar as your protests of "innocence" that you somehow don't understand that this topic was controversial, or that many terrorist groups in the Middle East deliberately use human shields to cause "civilian" casualties, disingenuous in the extreme. For all my 'good-war' beliefs - that this anti-Hezboallah war is everything to Israel that the Iraq war was NOT to the U.S (grave national security threat - soldiers kidnapped and killed, thousands of missiles raining down on their cities) - I haven't started a single new article on this issue. Like Israel, I've only responded to a few extreme provocations from clear anti-semitic statements.

You deserved to have your thread locked. At bare minimum.

- C.D. Proud Member of the Reality Based Community

[ugarte]

13. So you can tell from an F-16 if a carload of civilians are Hezbollah?

Do the women and children have a certain look about them that gives them away??

[Wonk]

14. Why do you hate America?

The same logic you just posted makes the WTC, Sears Tower, LAX, etc. legitimate targets as well. Oh, except those are "ours" instead of "theirs".

[Leopolds Ghost]

16. please be respectful, I don't want this thread locked...

I mean, tempers are obviously hot on this issue, let's not forget that far more death and destruction has been going on under our nose on a daily basis. Thanks to America's "renewed sense of pride" under Bush, we're just better able to justify not having to rub our noses in it, sort of like Barbara Bush.

What I find disturbing is when magazines and newspapers that should know better write splash headlines like WHAT WILL THIS MEAN FOR THE PRICE OF OIL?? I mean WTF? Don't they realize neither Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon or the Sinai has any oil?? I guess they assume any country that's got lots of worthless P-O-S desert, like Texas, must be bursting with black gold. Like that "biblical oil" guy who insists that Exodus mentions that Israel is full of oil, providing good enough economic reason for Armageddon from his point of view.

[Leopolds Ghost]

15. What you're advocating is Total War.

That's the original WWII era name for the precise doctrine you just enunciated. All sides engaged in it back then. I'm just sayin'.

Before 1943 when we started doing it, bombing of civilian populations (like during the Blitz) was considered the worst possible war crime (remember, this was before the Holocaust was discovered.) The German rockets were considered terrorist weapons.

It was a tragedy when we decided to stoop to that level and legitimize state-sponsored terrorism from the air. Robert Macnamara, who helped pioneer the technical development of firebombing, pointed out that "what we were doing was a was crime back then."

Now, this ain't firebombing, what Israel is doing today is straight up warfare, like the Blitz is now considered to be straight-up warfare in comparison to later holocausts (not to mention the Holocaust). But does that make it right?

Especially when Israel and the US both just abandoned the fig-leaf of INTENT ("the difference between our air force over Baghdad and the Al Quaeda hijackers is intent", remember?)

Until recently the peacenick argument against Iraq war posed by people like me was directed against the notion that it was a just war. Now folks are beginning to open up the whole can of worms that is intent, not seen since Vietnam (i.e.) "we're bombing the civilians because they deserve it" or "a certain number of civilian deaths are acceptible".

instead of 90's era nostrums like "every civilian death is a tragedy" or "at least we're not TRYING to hit civilians like those terrorists who we haven't actually been focussing on lately."

And be careful who you're addressing when you throw around accusations of anti-semitism. I'm a relative leftie who's a Christian and believes that Israel is the Holy Land and Jews are the Chosen People. Jesus was a Jew, remember? I despise anti-semitism on the left, such as people who advocate a "one state solution" in which the state in question is an Islamic state; they want Israel to cease to exist. I guess they think two wrongs make a right, but religion and philosophy teach us that often, unintended good results can emerge from the evil actions of others, such as the actions on both sides (in the 40s and 50s) that displaced the Palestinians in the first place. Unfortunately quite a bit of people in the Middle East have redirected the doctrines of anti-semitism and racism mastered by the Nazis (in the case of the Arabs) and South Africa (in the case of Israel, an erstwhile ally) against each other. Let's not forget that Arabs and Israelis are the same people, separated by religion.

[pinto]

18. Locking.

Questions and/or comments about the operation of DU need to go to the Administrators.

You can contact them privately here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/contact.html

And please don't repost a locked thread or reopen a previously locked thread.

If there's been some confusion about what was posted first, or not, they will help you work it out.

Again, we are enforcing the generally accepted rules here.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/forums/rules.html

Thanks.