No, the Palestinian civilians don’t somehow “deserve” being killed.

There are people making the spurious claim that Hamas was elected by the people of Gaza and thus are the legitimate government of Gaza and thus it’s okay to kill residents of Gaza without any restraint.

This is utterly ridiculous. Hamas was elected *once*, in 2006, on a platform of ending Fatah corruption that was siphoning most aid to the Palestinians into corrupt politicians’ pockets. They haven’t allowed an election since, because they’d *lose*, having turned out to be just as corrupt as Fatah but way more violent. They have proceeded to impose their rule at gunpoint upon the residents of Gaza, probably killing more Palestinians than Israel has killed in the years since. Even Amnesty International has recognized that Hamas’s rule over Gaza has been brutal and in violation of all humanitarian principles. The chances of Hamas being re-elected if Hamas ever allowed a free and fair election (which they have not done for *SEVENTEEN YEARS*) is essentially zero.

I’m not going to be upset at all if Hamas gets exterminated by the Israelis like the vermin they are. And I suspect the Palestinians will breathe a sigh of relief if that happens too. Unless Israel truly believes that all Palestinians love Hamas and decide to start slaughtering Palestinians indiscriminately, which would move the focus away from the people who need killing (Hamas leadership and gunmen) and allow Hamas to get away with their mass murder of both Israelis and Palestinians.

— Badtux the Geopolitics Penguin

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We rebuilt Germany and Japan after destroying them. Israel has done nothing for Palestinians after rendering them stateless.

Twenty years after WW2, Germans were selling us a million Volkswagens and the Japanese were flooding us with Honda motorcycles, having rebuilt their respective countries with massive American assistance. Germany and Japan are American allies to this day because of that gracefulness in rebuilding our former enemies.

Seventy-five years after the creation of the state of Israel via a massive act of ethnic cleansing, the people that Israel ethnically cleansed off the lands of their new country are still stateless and still living in misery. Israel has done nothing — zero — to help them rebuild or help them find a state to be home. All they’ve done is blame other people for the results of an action that Israel did itself — ethnic cleansing of people off of their lands.

Note that ethnic cleansing is *not* the same as genocide. When the USSR seized 1/3rd of Poland after WW2, they purged the ethnic Poles off of their new lands and replaced them with Russians. When Poland was given 1/4th of Germany after WW2, they purged the ethnic Germans off of their new lands and replaced them with poles. There was a massive refugee crisis in Europe in the aftermath of WW2 due to all this ethnic cleansing going on, such as the German population of Koenigsberg being deported to Germany and being replaced with Russians (and Koenigsberg being renamed to Kaliningrad). But — the difference is that the people being displaced had a nation to belong to.

The same is not true of the Palestinians. Seventy-five years on, they are still stateless and homeless due to Israel’s actions in 1948. You now have five generations of people descended from those whose birth certificates said “Mandate of Palestine” or “Province of Palestine” on them — people who have no nation to call home, because the one on their ancestors’ birth certificate no longer exists anymore.

I’m not saying that Israel could solve the Palestinian problem by themselves. But they have to take the lead, because they’re the ones who created the problem. Instead, they just blame everybody else but themselves for the problem they created.

— Badtux the “When will it end?” Penguin

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It’s a little more complicated than “Jews are the new Nazis and Palestinians are the new Jews”

What blows my mind with all of this is the fact that during WW2 the Jew’s went thru all kinds of horrific shit then they turned around and inflicted a good portion of that same stuff on the Palestinian people. Then the US decided to back their every step because the Christians need them for some death cult bullshit prophecy to take place so we end up sending them money left and right. On top of that our politicians pass laws to punish business owners who refuse to support this madness. It’s a fucked up situation all around but I refuse to feel sorry for Israel on any level. – u/303onrepeat

The story is a little more complex than that, but yeah, Israel basically created the Palestinian people via the shared suffering and experiences of the Arabs who were ethnically cleansed from Israel in the early years to make room for Jews. (And for those who deny that it was ethnic cleansing — Israel’s own founders said as much in their papers and documents, which have been declassified and published over the past twenty years). From the perspective of Israel’s founders the suffering of those pushed out of Palestine was "not our problem" — they were barely out of Hitler’s concentration camps (in fact, in 1947 most of Europe’s surviving Jews were *still* in Hitler’s concentration camps, except renamed "relocation camps" and with the machine guns turned around to face outwards to keep Europe’s population from finishing the job that Hitler started) and had no resources to deal with the refugee problem they created because they, Europe’s former Jews, simply *had nowhere else to go*. Most of Europe’s Jews wanted to go to the United States. The United States wanted nothing to do with "dirty kikes", that was an era where there were still plenty of hotels and restaurants and stores and such with "No Jews Allowed" signs on them.

So. Israel. Created as an act of desperation via means that were ruthless but, in the eyes of Israel’s founders, absolutely necessary. I don’t know that I can second-guess them even with the benefit of hindsite, remaining in Hitler’s concentration camps was damn well not a solution for their problem because sooner or later the US would withdraw and Europeans would have finished what Hitler began.

So anyhow, the United States created this problem, so the United States should damn well solve it, but racism prevents either of the solutions that would actually work — the US sure as hell isn’t going to give citizenship to a buncha Arabs who, like, aren’t even *Christian* (well, mostly — there is a small percent of Palestinians who are Christian), and while US sympathies towards Israel’s Jews are less harsh the US still prefers the world’s Jews to be over there and not over here. US support for Israel is predicated on the reality that if the Arabs actually did succeed in pushing Israel’s Jews into the sea, the United States would end up on the hook to accept them as refugees, because nobody else would do so and the US voting public isn’t going to accept another genocide of Jews. I.e., U.S. support for Israel is inherently based upon racism and anti-Semitism — we want’em over there rather than over here.

The reality is that the giant concentration camps in Gaza and the West Bank are too small in size to have a viable economy or to support the population interned there, and besides, having an actual independent Palestine in control of Tel Aviv’s water supply is a No Go. The two state solution isn’t going to work. The only solutions left are for either a) someone to give those poor stateless slobs a state to belong to (the majority of Palestinians are stateless, all they have is a UN Refugee Card, they have citizenship in no state actually recognized by anybody), or b) Israel finally implements the Final Solution to their Palestinian problem.

Neither is palatable to anybody at the moment, so the misery continues.

– Badtux the “Racism sucks” Penguin

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Of moral equivalencies

Hamas is a terrorist organization.

There, I said it. They’re a terrorist organization.

What makes them a terrorist organization? Simple: They target unarmed civilians. That is what makes them a terrorist organization.

So a friend of mine posted a photograph on her Facebook page of Razan al-Najjar, the 21 year old paramedic who was targeted and killed by an Israeli sniper from close to 300 yards away while helping people who had been injured. And an Israel defender said: “Why don’t you post Israeli victims of Hamas?” I.e., the Israeli government isn’t doing anything that Hamas doesn’t do.

So he was saying that a terrorist organization targeting civilians is exactly equivalent to the Israeli government targeting civilians so we should post photos of both?

Well, I suppose we could. But the tens of thousands of unarmed civilians killed by Israel far outnumber the hundreds of unarmed civilians killed by Hamas, so we’d mostly be posting photos of Palestinian civilian faces anyhow.

Besides, I thought the Israeli government wasn’t supposed to be a terrorist organization. Even though they’re killing unarmed civilians, unarmed medical personnel even, which is exactly what terrorist organizations do.

But this person apparently believes that because Hamas is a terrorist organization, the fact that Israel’s government is behaving like a terrorist organization is fine and dandy.

So there you have it, straight from an Israel defender: Israel’s government is a terrorist organization. Hey, he said it first — though he apparently didn’t realize what it was that he was saying!

– Badtux the Snarky Penguin

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Corrupt Prime Minister of Israel wags the dogs, launches airstrikes to distract attention from possible indictment

End result: an Israeli F-16 is shot down after Syria launches a barrage of anti-aircraft missiles in response.

Well, there’s $30M down the drain. Bibi is apparently about to be indicted for corruption. So he needed a distraction. But this was one helluva risky distraction, and could have cost lives if the pilots hadn’t ejected when they couldn’t shake the missiles off their tail.

I wonder if the supposed Iranian drone was as real as the imaginary poison gas that Assad used against his own people?

– Badtux the Skeptical Penguin

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Don’t fuck with the Middle East, Donald

It never turns out well. Just ask George W. Bush. Or Ronald Reagan’s ghost, for that matter — he fucked around in Lebanon, it got a couple hundred Marines killed, he said “fuck this shit” and declared victory and went home (after blowing up a buncha innocent people with shells from a battleship).

Yeah, you sure paid attention, didn’t you, Donald? Doing exactly what everybody warned you not to do — declared that you’re going to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. A move for which there is literally NO gain for the United States — and you’re supposed to be President of the United States, dude, not President of Israil.

SIGH.

— Badtux the “Don’t these people ever learn?” Penguin

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When unscrupulous journalists lie by using numbers deceptively

So, ThinkProgress, a lefty news rag, says that Israel just signed a $38 billion dollar military assistance agreement with the United States. This gives the impression that the U.S. is about to write a $38 billion dollar check to Israel. That is not, in fact, what happened.

First of all, this agreement is for $3.8 billion per year over a 10 year period. Accounting for inflation, this is not out of line with historical military aid to Israel. Yet even once you arrive down at the $3.8 billion figure, you’re *still* not understanding what you’re looking at. The reality is that Israel does not need military assistance from the United States. In 2012, Israel even baldly stated such to the United States. So why $3.8 billion, and why now?

If we had actual journalists here in the United States rather than propaganda hacks, they might cover that story. But probably not. Because the reason for this sum of money, and the reason it is now, is one of the greatest embarrassments to the United States since the Brewster Buffalo. I am talking, of course, about the F-35 fighter.

The deal is that Israel isn’t getting a check for $3.8 billion. Rather, what they’re getting is export credits that can only be reimbursed for American warfighting gear. They’re basically getting store credit at the US Military-Industrial Complex Store, that can only be spent there.

Why is this important? It is because Israel is one of the participants in the F-35 program. Due to the skyrocketing cost of the aircraft — now $148M per plane — and the poor performance of the F-35 due to the design compromises made to accomodate the USMC jump jet version of the F-35 and the USN carrier version of the F-35, Israel had threatened to pull out of the F-35 program and either buy more F-16’s or buy planes from someone else. That would have wrecked havoc with the production plans for the F-35 and resulted in lost profits for Lockheed-Martin, and that would have made Baby Jesus cry.

So basically, the deal is this: Israel gets $3.8 billion per year in credits, and Israel stays in the F-35 program. Basically, it’s an indirect subsidy to Lockheed-Martin. Israel has already spent $1.4 billion dollars on nine F-35 fighters. The plan is for Israel to continue buying F-35 fighters at a rate of roughly nine per year for the remainder of the new 10 year agreement, thereby helping keep Lockheed-Martin’s assembly line purring away.

In short, it’s really more of a $2.6 billion military assistance package with $1.4 billion on top of that to subsidize Lockheed-Martin. And given that the majority of that $2.6 billion also has to be spent in the United States, the only real question is why this is called military assistance to Israel, when in actuality it is corporate welfare to American defense companies.

But I suppose pointing out that reality — that this is actually a corporate welfare package for American defense companies, not the spectacular boon for Israel that it looks like at surface glance — would require actual, like, research, and everybody knows that research makes Baby Jesus cry. Why do research when you can whip up a facile surface glance at a big number like $38 billion, move on, and rake in the money from ads without having to actually, like, work for a living? What a job!

– Badtux the “Hell, I do a better job than that” Penguin

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False accusations of anti-Semitism are nothing more than dishonest bullying

So, Egypt is about to raze Rafah.

Not the Rafah in the Gaza Strip, mind you. That Rafah, a city whose history goes back to the time of Christ, has already been razed multiple times over the centuries and the Israelis have essentially razed it a couple of times themselves but it keeps springing back up, poorer and more miserable each time, until now it’s mostly a collection of tin roofs held together by duct tape. No, they’re going to raze Rafah, Egypt, which until Israel gave the Sinai back to Egypt in 1982 was just a rural suburb of the main city with a few thousand homes and a lot of agricultural land. Then Rafah became divided by the new border, and eventually a wall was built through the city separating this suburb from the main city.

Why they are doing this… well, it’s because Israel demanded that they do something about the smuggling. The smuggling was interfering with the plan to punish the Palestinians by turning the Gaza Strip into the world’s largest concentration camp for Palestinians. That cannot be allowed. Thus the demand, with the implied threat of “if you don’t do it, we’ll cut off the $1.5B/year you get in military aid from the Americans.” Everybody knows that Israel runs the U.S. Middle Eastern policy, so that implied threat wasn’t ignored by Egypt’s brutal military dictatorship. So Egypt’s brutal military dictatorship simply did a Stalin and said, “no people, no problem.” That is, if the land is razed flat for miles from the border, there cannot be tunnels dug from within homes to the other side of the border. Not practically, anyhow.

But that isn’t the point of this post. The point of this post is what happens the moment someone criticizes the Israeli government’s policies. At which point the flying monkeys paid by Israel to troll blogs and Internet forums come on in force and say “you’re anti-Semite! You want to exterminate Jews!” At which point I say… what… the… fuck? Since when is criticizing the policies of a sovereign state the same as wanting to exterminate an ethnic group who, frankly, I care nothing about in any way positive or negative because it just isn’t relevant to my life and I think the whole concept of “ethnic groups” is pretty much made-up bullshit in the first place? But then I realize that this accusation of “anti-semitism” isn’t intended to be accurate. It’s intended to be bullying. And far too often is successful as such.

Fundamentally, conflating criticism of Israel’s apartheid policies with “anti-Semitism” is not an attempt to engage in discourse or win hearts and minds. It’s an intellectually dishonest attempt to bully people. And it’s surprisingly effective, as is the tactic of calling Jewish critics of Israel’s apartheid policies such as Max Blumenthal “self-hating Jews”. But it is, of course, utter bullshit. It is an attempt to end discussion of a government’s policies by claiming that anybody who doesn’t agree with that government’s policies wants to exterminate the Jewish people.

Apartheid is not the answer in Israel any more than it was in South Africa. Creating fictitious Bantustans on a portion of your land in order to deny fundamental human rights to millions of residents of your country is no more ethical today than it was in the days when South African Prime Minister B.J. Vorster stripped South African citizenship from the entire black population of South Africa and embarked on a massive program of forced relocation to force them into quasi-independent “homelands” that in actuality were completely controlled economically and politically by the South African government. But invariably when you say this, some troll pops up and says, “You just want to exterminate Jews!” in much the same way that black critics of the South African apartheid regime were often accused of, “You just want to exterminate white people!”.

Well, that’s a lie, and people who say that kind of bullshit are liars, and I’ll call them what they are — intellectually dishonest liars who want to squash intellectual discourse rather than engage in it. If you want to engage in honest discourse I’m quite willing to do so, as should be clear by clicking on the tag “Israel” under this post. We probably won’t come to any agreement if we’re coming from such fundamentally different perspectives, but at least we can gain a clearer understanding of where each of us stands. But if you come in here being a dishonest liar? Bah. Eat pie, trolls.

Which, if you see comments that read, simply, “I like pie”, is exactly what happened: a troll got pied. Good riddance.

– Badtux the Trolled Penguin

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Israeli professor under fire for implying that Palestinians are human

At least, that’s all I can gather from this story. Apparently Prof. Hanoch Sheinman, a law professor at Bar Ilan University, started out an email re-scheduling a test due to the unpleasantness in Gaza by saying he hoped all his students were well and were not amongst those who’d been affected by the hundreds of dead or thousands displaced in the current situation. The result was outrage on both the part of his students and the university administration because… uhm. That one sorta eludes me. Because he implied that Palestinians are human by counting Palestinians as well as Israelis as being among those dead or displaced?

Naw, no racism in Israel, nosirree…

Meanwhile, Gaza’s only power station has been destroyed. It cannot be rebuilt in under a year because everything’s gone — boilers, turbines, everything. Just completely flattened. Remember that article I linked to a few days ago about premature infants dying in Gaza hospitals because of a lack of electricity? Well, that’s going to be the situation for the next year, at least.

But I guess from the Israeli point of view, since Palestinians aren’t human, that doesn’t matter.

One last reminder: Hamas has never — ever — won the vote of the majority of Palestinians. They came to power because they won a plurality of votes, *not* because the majority of Palestinians supported Hamas. That little fact kind of exposes the lie of “well, they’re all Hamas so it’s okay to kill them.” They’re not.

But hey, they’re not human, so who cares, right? Right?!

– Badtux the Disgusted Penguin

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The negotiations are a lie

The negotiations are a lie.

Secretary of State John Kerry and Israel’s foreign minister both say they’re attempting to negotiate a cease-fire with Hamas so that civilians can be evacuated from war zones and food and water brought in for civilians. There is only one problem: Neither one will talk to Hamas, the people they’re supposedly attempting to negotiate a cease-fire with, because “we don’t negotiate with terrorists”.

There’s no such thing as negotiations with people you refuse to talk to. There are only “negotiations”, just a PR stunt on the part of the US and Israel. The reality is that neither Israel nor its junior partner, the United States, will talk to the people they’re supposedly negotiating with because neither one has any real interest in stopping the shooting until Israel has attained whatever military objectives Israel is interested in attaining. (Which objective I have no ideas about, unless it’s a re-enactment of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising with the Israelis playing the role of the Nazis and the Palestinians playing the role of the Jews, but I’m sure the Israelis must have *some* objective, right?)

Meanwhile, too bad about the dead Palestinian kids and those women and children that Israel killed by refusing to let them evacuate a school that was on the edge of a combat zone, but hey, they’re BROWN, so it’s not like they’re REAL kids, right? Right?

– Badtux the “It’s not racism if it’s Jews doing it right?” Penguin

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