Rostere

Has your incredible bias completely blinded you to the facts? Do you not realize there were something like 30 tunnels dug under the Israeli border, preparing for a huge attack, potentially with thousands of victims, for the fall? Not to mention incessant rocket attacks from Gaza. This is what you call not rocking the boat? Yes, and Israel has ****ING NUCLEAR WEAPONS. Hypocrisy much? Every side has their ways of trying to even the odds. I think it is worth noting that even though Israeli intelligence have known about these tunnels for quite some time (so we can assume they have also existed) Hamas have not tried to attack through them. In the end, it's not about what you have, but how you use it. I condemn Israel for getting nuclear weapons more than Hamas for digging tunnels in any case. Both are hardly constructive, but the real condemnation would of course come when these weapons are used. In any case, large-scale attack like you speak of would not be feasible. We have seen videos of Hamas soldiers attacking through a tunnel, with an attack team consisting of five people. Worth noting, they didn't attack any civilians in Israel, but they shot a few IDF soldiers who were (or seemed to be) sleeping on their watch on a garrison before they were driven back into the tunnel. It should say a lot that even though the conflict has taken such a dire turn, we've barely seen any tunnel attacks at all, and those we have seen have been by very small attack teams. Here is an article on the military aspect of tunnels if you are seriously interested.

You can never get enough of this: Or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jjLMm7C2EY

Okay. Anyone else thinking this sounds like some obscure Irish political party...?

The impact of the aggression on Israel's part during this massacre is sure to have consequences on the political allegiances on the Palestinian side. Israel have shown that even if Hamas hasn't fired any rockets, or really made any attack of any sort since the last truce they will still be attacked anyway, just to garner support for the sitting Israeli prime minister. Keep in mind this quote from here: Israel have shown Hamas, and more importantly the Palestinian population, that it doesn't matter if they rock they boat or not, they are going to be attacked anyway. It's not about Hamas, it's about gaining support from Israeli voters. It's about a right-wing prime minister trying to gain far-right credentials in an increasingly extremist country (who just like Putin is being hit in the ass by his own propaganda pushing him further from peace, accidentally creating a self-fulfilling feedback loop of hate and racism). At least the people in Gaza are not subject to land grabs and continuous ethnic cleansing, like the Palestinians on the West Bank are. Gaza is figuratively speaking the crazy patient who bites everyone within reach, the West Bank is the anaesthetized patient who is sleeping on the operation table while the doctor is removing his organs one by one. Anyway, here's a step-by step walk-through of the most common misconceptions and lies you get to hear about the I/P conflict. I wish I had the time to elaborate on all of the points directly in response to forum members in this thread, instead I leave this link for those of you who are interested in the knowing more about the background of the current chain of events.

Yeah that's what you call a career limiting move I suppose it could be fake but the reality is we already know Russia is giving military aid to Ukraine in several ways I think it's definitely possible that the soldier meant to write that he was working on a notebook computer (laptop), and not a "BUK" missile system. That said, there is no explanation for him being located in Ukraine. The word for the missile system and slang for a laptop is the same word in Russian, so I think it is also possible the vagueness in the statement might have been an intentional joke from his side. "Working on a "book", if you know what I mean..."

Here is a story which can help us to understand what goes on inside the heads of the children which are enduring the current round of indiscriminate bombardment on Gaza.

The rebels' latest strategy - stop swearing to appease god

lol

Supporters of the far-right Israeli government parties at a rally. I can picture the supporters of Israel's current policies of this forum standing beside them and chanting. Today, the outward faces of Israel are still from a generation with direct connections to the USA, Europe and Western values. The next generation of leaders will come from a much different background, one of having lived their entire lives on ethnically cleansed foreign soil. It's difficult to say why the people who instinctively support Israel in spite of everything do so today; whether it is the product of some latent islamophobia or a feeling that you are supporting your "friend" against a "stranger". The people who represent the hooligans above currently make up a little less than half of the current governing coalition in the Knesset. By the changing demographics (I've laid them out before in this thread, I think...) these will be running the show in 20 years or less (not counting deaths or emigration). By that time, it will be impossible for the West to support Israel any longer, and for the West to see Israel as a "friend" rather than a "stranger". We've already seen tensions increase, but really, things will only get worse in the near- to mid-term. This will never come to pass. Hamas reflects the will of the people of Palestine and was lawfully elevated to power by the ballot. Both the Israelis and Palestinians covet the same land and shall be at one another's throats eternally... or until the Israelis finally embark on a campaign of extermination against the perfidious Palestinians and properly finish the job in Gaza. You've left out some very important details. Hamas was elected lawfully, at that time they had the support of the people. Their support has been waxing and waning though. At it's lowest point, in the middle of the previous lull (when Hamas became as powerless as they are today, with the new Egyptian regime and the break with Iran over Syria), Hamas support was in the 20% range. Their previous top was right after the end of the previous hostilities. Since then, their support was fading, until Israel started the current war. Things are getting so predictable now, it should not be hard for anyone to see how sympathies are shifting both in Israel and in Gaza. At the end of this conflict, Hamas will likely poll at a local maximum. Then, their support will slowly fade until the next outbreak of hostilities. At the same time, the current war effort is bolstering support for the sitting Israeli prime minister and his alliance of right-wing parties, further making some kind of settlement look impossible. This war is only serving to polarize opinion, and I'm frankly even a bit surprised that Netanyahu is hastening the long-term shift toward the far-right in Israel for short-term personal political approval.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-m-walt/aipac-americas-israel-policy_b_5607883.html

Which is a convenient reversal, if we assume the rebels had the expertise to actually use a sophisticated SAM system that normally requires multiple trained personnel, but it ain't the only one. The Ukrainian government was claiming earlier that the rebels had no buks and had not captured any, and have said that they (Ukraine) had none in the area, both of which appear to be outright lies. Plus, they had claimed that Russian jets had shot down one of their sukhois yesterday as well, so taking that at face value they'd have a reason to have active AA in the area. Personally I'm sceptical on the last part at least because I find it extremely unlikely that Russian fighters had anything to do with that sukhoi crashing any more than they randomly bombed apartment buildings in Donbass the previous day. AlJ at least has also said that Strelkov's claim of downing a plane was actually posted significantly before the last contact with MH17, to whit "The military commander of the rebels, a Russian named Igor Strelkov, had written on his social media page at 13:37 GMT, half an hour before the last reported contact with MH17, that his forces had brought down an Antonov An-26, a turboprop transport plane of type used by Ukraine's forces, in the same area." The aircraft disappeared from radar 13:15 UTC. "Strelkov" wrote post at 13:50 UTC. Also, the site of last known radar contact is erroneous. I have also heard that Ukrainian officials are claiming that Russians would have shot down the plane. I don't particularly trust what they have to say much. I trust more the images of rebel SA-11 systems which the rebels allege they have stolen from the Ukrainians (probably true), which reporters have seen in rebel-held territory. I find it likely that all of the planes have been downed by rebel AA and none by Ukrainians or Russians.

Truck driving with SA-11 missile system in rebel-held territory, one or two missiles short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mICnsgEY7wE And this, rebel talking about how Russian experts was fixing a SA-11 system for them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxVZvh9YScU

The three kidnapped teenagers have nothing to do with Hamas. Israel is primarily not targeting any rockets. You know, these ("Qassam" homebrew rockets) are small things which are as easy to set up as a mortar. If Israel say they their attacks on civilians have anything to do with rocket attacks, that means they are firing on houses near sources of rocket fire, when the Hamas members who fired the rockets have already ran away. Alternatively, which seems to be their current way of doing this, Israel will bomb houses they think someone who has fired rockets has entered. Hamas is typically not firing their rockets from inside houses if that is what you think If I say I will kill all your relatives if another, unrelated, South African fires a rocket from somewhere in your neighbourhood which lands outside my house, who is the murderer when I kill all your relatives? I would leave you to answer that question. Hamas is an extremist organization. I don't particularly care about their specific beliefs as I don't support them. They are a symptom of the terrible conditions in Gaza and the tragic Palestinian recent history. Nelson Mandela was a "despicable terrorist" before his release and the abolition of apartheid in South Africa (and yes, I'm sure there were lots of rotten eggs in the ANC). Israel was founded by terrorists who drove out the British by killing both soldiers and civilians. Ireland gained independence while terrorists were fighting for it. Hitler was a vegetarian. The Black Panthers fought against racism against blacks in the US. Whenever there is a fight, there is also going to be both nice guys and idiots who are fighting. Before this whole debacle, Hamas had an approval rating of about 20%. Their last spike of popularity was in connection to Israel's last violent streak in Gaza. Focussing on idiotic things Hamas have said is that saying blacks can't have equal rights because the Black Panthers are a violent group. You must ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS focus on the injustices, not who is fighting for what. Focusing on a statement about a country's "right to exist" is a red herring. North Korea is a totalitarian dictatorship - I don't support it's right to exist. Israel is an ethnocracy built on the expulsion of "unwanted" natives - I don't support it's right to exist. BUT, this is only with regards to the states as concepts. I sympathize with the poor people who live in these nations and who are forced to endure the complete bull**** of these countries every day. Saying that you don't support a country's "right to exist" makes it sound like if you are going to procure a wizard's hat and just make the country and all it's inhabitants disappear. Obviously there are people in Hamas who would like to kick out of Palestine as many Jews as they can, but supporting or not supporting a country's right to exist is not fundamentally a problem. I am completely cool with anyone saying that they don't support the "right of Israel to exist as a colonial settler-state in it's current form". I am not at all cool with anyone who says they don't support the "right of Israel's citizens to exist". But those are fundamentally different things, and Hamas should be pressed only on the latter point. Forcing them to agree to Israel's right to exist, without specifying what they mean by that, is like forcing Gandhi to recognize the British Empire (note the latter word) to exist. Obviously he wouldn't, because he didn't support colonialism and imperialism. But that does not mean he would not recognize the right of any Englishman to exist. This is all really just mostly a silly fight over the exact meaning of a sentence. Personally, I would support a party who is prepared to 1) recognize equal rights of all people, regardless of ethnicity and religion 2) recognize that no people has an inherent right to any piece of land 3) recognize that in recent history, Israel has been brutally occupying and uprooting Palestinians and stealing their land, and this wound has to be healed.

That's irrelevant if the guy in question has previously said he has no social media accounts though, because in that case we have no clue who is posting under his name. For all we know it could be oby (or Bruce, or me for that matter). I'm not at all saying it's him personally who is posting, it's probably some "keyboard warrior" sitting somewhere in a basement of a rebel base in Donetsk. For sure it's a rebel propaganda account, who believed that rebels had shot down an AN-26. "We don't have the equipment to shoot down a plane flying that high" Yeah, right. Another dude says on Twitter about the "Strelkov" account: "Run by DPR volunteers with occasional posts by the man himself. Have been following it for weeks" Here is a cached tweet from a rebel propaganda page which was also recently deleted. Coincidence?

Spot on. No side is perhaps ever 100% innocent in any conflict, by defining "innocence" not as a discrete variable but over a continuous spectrum. But by portraying of the conflict between Gazan terrorists and Israel as a conflict between two equals, who are roughly equally culpable, you risk becoming a "useful idiot", like the teacher who puts both the bully and the victim in detention "because it's never one person's fault that two people are quarrelling". One party consists of 1,6 million people (a small angry subgroup of which fire home-made rockets), most of which has been ethnically cleansed from their homeland by the other party, recent immigrants who are sponsored each year with 3 billion dollars worth of weapons by the USA, which they use to protect themselves while they continually steal land from the other party. I think we both agree that the bombing of Dresden was perhaps barbaric and unnecessary, but it would still be absolutely ridiculous to hold Britain equally culpable for WW2 as Germany. So it's entirely possible that one part commits an atrocity, but still has the moral high ground over another party. The fact that both parts do bad stuff does not translate to that they are equally culpable. The difference of what Hamas (which does not represent all Palestinians...) has been doing to Israel and what Israel has been doing to all Palestinians for over 50 years now is one of several orders of magnitude. It's the same tendency of someone commenting that "You shouldn't say that the Jews were completely defenceless during WW2... They did organize the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, you know". Yes, technically correct, but completely misleading. Nobody has been saying that Palestinians are innocent angels who have never hurt a fly. I'm just saying that, say, if China designated your homeland to be the homeland of Muslim Uyghurs (or Pakistanis, or whatever...), and if these later arrived to evict you and everyone you know from England to declare their "Muslim nation" there in place of what was there before, all with the tacit approval of the current world powers, then you would think you'd have the right to resist that with violence, I'm 100% sure. And I know of several right-wing members of this forum who are saying they support Israel, who I'm sure would never stand being ethnically cleansed to make place for the "chosen people" to live on their "promised land" (whatever land or people that might be) without a fight. In current events, as you probably all know by now, the conflict has taken another shocking and unexpected turn of events: the first Israeli has now been killed by a Hamas mortar, an IDF soldier close to the Gazan border. Meanwhile, 246 Palestinians have been killed, most of them civilians, in Israeli efforts to demolish houses and infrastructure. 246-1.

I find it ridiculous that people believe that the rebels have twitter accounts or vk and are bragging on them. How gullible can you be... You said what? What's so strange about the rebels having social media accounts for propaganda purposes? It's perfectly sensible.

Israelis cheering as Gaza is bombed threaten CNN reporter - "If you say one word wrong, we will destroy your car".

If it wasn't for the fact the a rebel leader first had stated triumphantly on VK that he had downed a military transport plane a few hours ago, and later that "DUDE I TOLD YOU DON'T FLY IN OUR AIRSPACE!!!111one" like an emo crybaby when he must have gotten information on that something must have gone wrong, then I could have considered the story that Ukraine did this by mistake. AP journalists have also seen a SA-11 system in rebel-held territory.

Strelkov don't have twitter account this is fake. This is also cause question who create this account and why spread this information. Rebels also don't have high altitude SAM defence their limit is 3500 meters. They just can't shot down plane at 10 000 meters altitude. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9K35_Strela-10 Warzone is closed to passenger flights also, no dispatchers work here. Nobody even known how this jet can appeared here. All this is looks very mysterious. It was a twitter discussion about a VK screenshot.

Epic fail on the part of these rebels... https://twitter.com/hashtag/strelkov#

The conclusion of my last post was that the Ukrainian rebels believed they had shot down another one.

"The military commander of the rebels, a Russian named Igor Strelkov, had written on his social media page shortly before the report of the airliner being downed that his forces had brought down an Antonov An-26 in the same area. It is a turboprop transport plane of a type used by Ukraine's forces." ...

http://nypost.com/2014/07/17/malaysian-passenger-plane-repordetly-crashes-in-ukraine/

. NATO forced own "members" (East European "allies" and other poorfags as Spain/Greece buy US/German weapons and serve as cannon fodder for glory of NWO ). For example everything is bad in Spanish economics and no military treat exist from side of Russia... They have quite big amount of leo tanks, but buy moar and moar now. Same story with Poland - they militarized too much during last 5-10 years and now play role of cannon fodder in East Ukrainian massacre (and in other Western wars for "democracy"). Also everyone can remember how US force own "allies" buy such useless junk as F-35. Putin do this? Lol, this is just nonsense. I think you are confused as to what are the reasons for Poland, the Baltic states et.c. to be in NATO. The US likely cares very little about Russia as a military threat. To give an example of this, consider the missile shield which was supposed to be put up in Poland/Czech Republic. This idea was scrapped by Obama in 2009 after minimal Russian pressure (although Bush was more insistent... Might have something to do with what Poland did in "the coalition of the willing"). This missile system was not intended to protect the US, but European NATO countries. Whatever NATO does in Europe is not because of the insistence of the US, but because of European NATO members. The US would like to spend as little as possible on a continent that is militarily pretty much the most stable place on earth anyway. The East European countries are not really "cannon fodder", or serving any military role at all for that matter. They are simply a liability NATO has agreed to take on, to protect them from Russian aggression on their own insistence, to preserve global stability. Compare Georgia. Georgia has figuratively been banging the NATO door like crazies, screaming to be let in, just like Poland and the Baltics before them. The US is sceptical towards Georgia because as I said earlier, they would add nothing to NATO, letting them in would just mean a liability to protect them against Russia - and NATO is thinking that a FUBAR border incident scenario looks too likely (just look at the previous war in Georgia). Poland might have served some small purpose as a part of the "coalition of the willing" but in reality, I think Poland, as well as the Baltics, are just a liability militarily. So with the current situation in Ukraine, Putin seems to do all he can to push Ukraine away from Russia. He looks like a petty thief who is more content with running away with some scraps of land in his arms than having the entirety of Ukraine politically on his side. He should have denounced Yanukovich as the corrupt kleptocrat he is the moment he was about to lose power, then Ukraine might even have been likely to elect a somewhat pro-Russian president afterwards. EU is in no condition to bring in Ukraine, and NATO should be very wary of doing so with the current anti-Russian mood provoked by Putin's actions, since a border incident between a NATO Ukraine and Russia is the last thing they want. Nevertheless EU and NATO popularity have surged immensely from previously very low levels in Ukraine, all due to Putin's poor handling of the Yanukovich debacle. It's a gift handed to NATO by Putin, for no other reason than sheer stupidity. He seems to be using every action at his disposal to make sure Ukraine stays as far away from Russia as possible. If anything, it seems the situation in East Ukraine is not at all planned by Putin but a NATO trap for him to make him alienate Russia from Ukraine, to divide them over a petty conflict over some scraps of land. The same can be said of increased NATO sympathies in Sweden and Finland. Sweden and Finland are currently countries which are not part of NATO, and which would obviously never ever (just think about the odds...) attack Russia militarily. The best thing Putin could do is to keep any troops away from the borders and not undertake any offensive exercises. This way the military budget of the countries would eventually atrophy into nothing and they would be even less of a military consideration than they already are. Instead the opposite is happening. Another military base has just been built close to the border of Finland and aerial exercises made in the Baltic Sea against countries which pose no threat at all to Russia in any way, which militarily defies any common sense (and if you really have military intentions, you should not be this obvious and deliberately blunt about your intentions). It's about as subtle as if Putin was to run up to the prime ministers, shouting "DURR PLEASE JOIN NATO DURR!!". This has been an unexpected blessing for the pro-NATO, increase military spending crowd, which otherwise politically is considered the lunatic fringe in both Sweden and Finland.