Did you just basically make a big ass excuse to not cite sources?
What? No....did you read what I wrote? Most of it had nothing to do with that.
Anyway, I'm not siding with Hamas. I think they're psychologically twisted kids from a horrible environment at best and evil murderers at worst. I don't believe in violence at all, especially not against civilians.
By comparison, I think the settler movement is the scum of the earth. While you can make a case that what they're doing (living on stolen land, basically) is not as morally reprehensible as bombing civilian areas, they're still every bit as bad as Palestinian terrorists in terms of perpetuating the conflict. Israel reallllllllly needs to cut its ties with them if it wants to look serious about peace.
And the analogy between 9/11 and the rocket attacks on Israel is a good one, in that the attacked country responded completely disproportionately and inappropriately.
Anyway, I'm not trying to defend or excuse what Hamas does, I've been saying that. The point I'm trying to make is not that nothing bad has happened to Israelis; it has. I spent more time living in Israel proper than in the occupied territories; I was there when a guy shot up a bunch of kids in a yeshiva; I met people who lost their daughter in a suicide bombing (and, admirably, are peace activists now). What I'm saying is that there's really no parallel between what Hamas has done to Israel, and what the Israeli military - a state-sanctioned, "legitimate" force - has done to the Palestinian people in return. This same thing goes for the occupation in general.
Most Israelis have less sympathy for the Palestinians' problems than they should, and a big reason for that is that most Israelis genuinely have no clue what life is like for Palestinians, for a number of reasons. When you can't see someone's life being hell, then it doesn't make sense for them to be using terrorism - so they must be a bunch of psychotic savages. If the Israeli population had any idea what the occupation is like I'm sure most of them would have a lot more sympathy, not to mention opposition to what the government is doing in there.
In Israeli culture, even one dead person is important. Look at the lengths went to retrieve CORPSES. We released lots of terrorists to get corpses back. Not to mention Shalit again. Read more about the latest negotiations.
I'd be sure interested in hearing about a culture where one dead person is not considered important.
Do you think Palestinians don't mourn their dead?
Anyway, the "common knowledge" point I'm making is that basically the whole world saw what Israel was doing in Gaza and condemned it. If you really want me to dig up articles about how the IDF bombed schools and mosques and houses full of civilians, and used white phosphorous, and so on, I can. But what I've been saying is that I shouldn't have to because this is not something that's in doubt.
Anyway, I'm not all that good with the news at the ol' USA. Can I get a run-down of what they are basically? Also how true they are.
If you mean the mainstream news media? Well in TV news you have ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN...they're pretty weak if you ask me. Not excruciatingly biased to one side of the American political spectrum, but really shallow and superficial for the most part, and certainly very reluctant to portray America or anybody from America in a bad light. Then you have Fox, which tries to portray itself as one of those channels, but it's essentially a propaganda outlet for the religious right, combined with some juvenile sensationalism. An unfortunate amount of people seem to think it's actually "news" though.
National Public Radio is probably the best of the major news sources on the airwaves; they're publicly funded and emphasize in-depth coverage of a lot of issues that get completely ignored or just brushed over in other media. I listen to this.
There are of course major newspapers, but I rarely read those. They have varying reputations, some known for being more liberal or conservative. But I don't think that too many of these (major ones) are biased the way, say, Fox is.
As far as the Gaza thing goes: Can we agree that A: The Israelis DO kill a lot of Palestinians, and B: The Palestinian leadership doesn't do much to protect it's citizenry in order to use the increased casualties for further propaganda purposes.
Well, as long as you distinguish "The Palestinian leadership" from Hamas. Hamas is in charge of Gaza; the Palestinian Authority runs the West Bank. And while it's hard to say if Hamas intentionally gets their own civilians killed for propaganda purposes, they certainly use them as propaganda. But levelling entire towns regardless of who's in there is wrong either way...
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Topic: Criticism of a nation is equal to criticism of a ethnic group within that nation (Read 26319 times)