Israelis assassinate Hamas leader

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3557601.stm

Nice move - that's bound to put an end to suicide bombings

I notice also that whilst pretty much every world leader has condemmed the assassination Bush's White House refuses to do so

Michael.

 

Bush is back on the war path aint he

Its a worrying world we live in now, i fear it will get much worse before an upturn

 

I was just on the verge of starting a thread next door on this, but I'll pipe in here instead…

I'm utterly horrified by the recent behaviour of Israel – they (i.e. the right wing thug Ariel Sharon) certainly seem to be the cause of much of the middle east's problems.

Not only is Israel in breach of UN regulations on many counts, and also a confirmed holder of WMD, they also seem intent upon recreating 'the Berlin wall' across land of which their ownership is at best questionable. Now they produce another example of state sponsored terrorism…

I hate the sanitised use in the UK press of the word 'assassination' - this was an act of pre meditated state sponsored terrorism, it nothing more credible than that. Sharon should be ousted and tried for war crimes and the UN should remove Israel's WMD as they are obviously a clear and present danger to the whole region.

It truly saddens me that the people who suffered so much throughout history with dignity (especially the mid 20th century) have now become such obvious abusers of power.

Tony.

PS If the US government turns out to be moronic enough to back Israel over this then the dividing lines for WW3 will be clearly set…

 

I find it very hard to feel sorry for this person.

He sat in his wheelchair sending other people to their deaths, he lived by the sword, and died by it.

Whilst the repercussions will probably lead to more violence, I don't blame the Israeli's for doing this at all, he was the head of a terrorist group whose speciality was sending suicide bombers to kill civilians. Hamas' objectives are the total removal of the Israeli state, and so they will never be satisfied. Talk of a massive retaliation from Hamas and their ilk seems a bit hollow to me as it stands, attacks on Israelis from the Palestinians are pretty continous anyway....

Sharon and Arafat are bad enough the pair of them, but with the more extremist groups like Hamas who will never see fit to negotiate with Israel for any deal that would lead to a resolution to the conflict (lets not forget some of the more right wing Israelis are hardly peace loving either ), the peace process will go nowhere. Without the extremist militants on the Palestinian side, and the extremist Israelis, Israel and the PA would find it much easier to negotiate with each other even given the past history of both the leaders.

Striking to kill the terrorist leaders isn't a solution, it will provoke retaliation, but equally leaving the people who command these extreme organisations to carry on about their business of urging others to kill themselves by blowing up a load of Israeli civilians isn't much of a solution either.

Incidentally, this attack on the hamas guy was apparently in retaliation for hamas attempting to blow up a chemical container in Israel....Not sure how legitimate that is but its what ive heard.

 

Well, by your logic, Israel is living by the sword and so can expect to die from it to.

As Tony so rightly said, sending helicopter gunships into another country to gun down a man in a wheelchair (and several bystanders) is state sponsored terrorism as bad as anything any Palestinian suicide bomber has done. Worse in fact as it's state sponsored.

Hamas has all kinds of rhetoric and no doubt the destruction of Israel is often mentioned as an objective but I think you'd find that if Israel were serious about peace and offered a peace initiative which gave the Palestinians the land that is theirs with dignity and made serious concessions about Jerusalem then support for Hamas would rapidly die away and all you'd be left with is a few nutters in the Palestinian equivalent of speakers corner.

The utter hypocricy, principally by the USA, of allowing Israel to get away with constant and blatant violation of UN resolutions imposed on it whilst going on about Iraq's non-compliance of UN resolutions (and using that as justification for war!) is quite maddening .

Michael.

 

Can anyone give a breif guide to the situation over there? Who's who and what's what. I'm quite ignorant to it other than to the extent of knowing violence has been going on there for as long as I can remember.

Who what where and why?

Cheers

MO

 

My 2p

 

It seems that we're mostly in agreement

I think that Ehud Barak probably was serious about peace but the proposal he put forward was still an insult to the Palestinians. It did virtually nothing about Jerusalem for starters.

When people say that the Palestinans keep rejecting proposals it's hardly surprising. Look at this way: if someone came and took over your house and then after constant battles on the staircase said "OK, you can have the attic and the upstairs bathroom and we'll keep the rest" you wouldn't really be happy about that would you? After all, it was your house to start with!

Michael.

 

One wonders how Hamas will retaliate

I can see its more legitimate than a suicide bombing tho', at least he was a military 'target', and much as I have no love for the Israeli govt, I have none for Hamas and shall not mourn for him, of course for the innocents caught up

 

It's war, I don't really see a big problem here.

It does surprise me that so many are keen to support the destruction of Israel and the erasure of the Jews, Israel is the only even remotely free country in the Middle East. The obvious solution for the ordinary Palestinian is to become a citizen. But the PLO and its ancilliary terror groups aren't going to allow progress towards any sort of peace whether through simple integration or towards a complex autonomous dictatorship.

It really pisses me off that the EU gives money to Arafat and his cronies and he simply steals it, but that's a separate issue.

Paul

 

Picture the most fundamentalist Catholics in the world, increase the religious and political fanaticism to the point that it is seen as a total benefit and joy to die for God, pick the country that they like the least on the face of the earth, then get that country's government to shoot the pope.

Israel have today proved they actually want to incite a Muslim / west world war just as much as Al-Qaida.

Tony.

 

Unfortunately you're trying to make this an anti-semitic issue which is absolutely isn't. I've nothing against the Israeli people and I've certainly got nothing against Jews. It's worth pointing out that the Arabs are also semites

I do see though that Israel has illegally and brutally occupied another state for the best part of 40 years and the rest of the world has pretty much sat back and let them do it despite UN resolutions since 1967 stressing: "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war" and calling for "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict". If I was a Palestinian I would accept nothing less than Israel returning to it's 1948 borders. I can also see that nearly 40 years of brutal occupation with Israel clearly not even ready to consider any remotely acceptable peace proposal and the US tacitly (often actively) supporting that, then people see that there is no other option than resorting to terrorism.

Terrorism doesn't come from extremists and fanatics, it comes from ordinary people who percieve they have no alternative.

I'm not condoning terrorism (I myself am a pacifist) but I can understand why it happens. One of the first things I thought when 9/11 happened was "you reap what you sow".

Michael.

 

MO! - the BBC News site has a pretty good rundown of it here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/middle_east/2001/israel_and_the_palestinians/default.stm

Start with the "Timeline" link (on the left, below the main story).

Michael.

 

It sometimes seems that the peace Sharon wants is the peace of the graveyard.

 

There's an issue of the legitimacy of its borders and failure to comply with international law, which is entirely separate from the desirability or otherwise of its internal political structure. The feeling throughout the Arab world is that Israel gets away with things that Arab states are condemned for, and that the Israeli government have no interest in pursuing a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians. Both these things are clearly true, and need to be addressed by the West if they're serious about removing a large part of the popular base for terrorism.

That isn't practical politics. It won't happen, the majority of Palestinians want to live in their own state, not become citizens of a state whose right to exist they dispute.

I'd agree with that if it started "But neither the PLO and its ancilliary terror groups nor the Israeli government..." The political representatives of neither side come out smelling of roses.

-- Ian

 

I went on holiday to Israel in 1989, a couple of years into the first intefada, while Sharon was in disgrace following his involvement in the Sabra/Shatila massacres, and Likud were in charge, under Shamir (another one-time Zionist terrorist). In one conversation with a couple of twenty/thirty-something Israeli jews I heard a quite chilling story.

Apparently, when Sharon was Defence minister, his solution to the Palestinian problem was as follows:
1) All Israeli jews are required to have air-raid shelters in their houses. This is not a requirement on non-jews
2) A code-word would be distributed through the synagogues
3) This code-word would then be broadcast over the public media
4) The jews, knowing the codeword, would then take shelter
5) The Israeli Defence Force would then bonb the country flat - killing all Palestinians and destroying what little property they have.
6) The jews would emerge from their shelters and start on rebuilding their homeland in a Brave New World.

This utter nutcase is now in charge of a nuclear arsenal!

(The guy telling me this was a Labour supporter, and hoped fervently for a fair and equitable settlement with the palestinian arabs - which involved a Palestinian homeland and suspension/removal of settlements. The other guy in the conversation was a very militant Likud supporter, did not deny the story, thought it had some failings, but liked iy in principle )

 

So when is someone a “terrorist� Is it purely down to the opinion of the US? The facts suggest that Israel invaded parts of Palestine using considerable military might and have continued to occupy this land illegally against international law, therefore is it not technically more accurate to describe any desperate Palestine action as being “freedom fighting� The term 'terrorist' is very loaded and seems to be applied to anyone who disagrees with the current US government viewpoint these days.

Tony.

PS I'm not condoning violence at all, but I can understand why the Palestinians are more than a bit pissed off.

 

Looked at over the last 25 or so years I would agree with you. Prior to that though, Israel was the subject of aggression by its neighbours. When the state was formed in 1948 (with a completely lunatic division between Jewish and Arab sections) the surrounding Arabs countries invaded on the very day of independence. By some miracle, within a week the Israeli forces had driven the invaders back and essentially got to what we call the "pre-1968" borders - with about 50% more territory that in the initial plan. The 6-day war and the "Yom Kippur" war were also invasions by their neighbours.

Since the late '70s though (principally from the invasion of Southern Lebanon), Israel has been the aggressor. I did see a deep inbuilt wariness and suspicion of their neighbours, coupled with a reilience never to be beaten, naturally arising from these early invasions. Since Camp David, Israel's immediate neighbours have taken a completely different view of regional politics, and (IIRC) all (even Syria - normally the most hawkish of them) now accept Israel's right to exist.

You would have thought though that having been through those early experiences they would have appreciated the counter-productive nature of continued aggressive actions and posturing against their neighbours.

 

The Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz stated their policy of "liquidating terrorists" will continue. Sharon, like Bush, is simply too aggressive, moronic and bigoted to see that this will probably be enough to unite the majority of the Arab / Muslim world against them (and all non-Muslims by association). I will be amazed if some very nasty things don't happen soon by way of retaliation. I lay the blame firmly at the utter stupidity and short-sightedness of the Israeli and US governments. Murdering religious leaders shows pretty poor negotiating skills IMHO.

Tony.

 

Muslims/Arabs have a very strong collective will that if one of them/one country is attacked, they perceive it as an attack on all of them.

I think the reason being partly that they see it as a Western attack upon Islam, akin to the Crusades.

Its sad in respect of that it could have nothing to do with it....I too am a pacifist, however, I am glad Saddam is gone, and of course we know Iraq was to oust him, not about womads primarily.

So it was justified IMO in the sense of removing a CLASS A1 kunt, (others of note are the late warlord Arcan, and Milosevic)
however I have limited info. and cannot really make an informed judgment.

However some of the Arabs have viewed it wrongly as an attack on Islam.

Getting back to the point, the problem amongst other things is inextricably linked with religion, cultures, history, and Israel's belief that they have a God given right to have a land of their own, believing that the Jews are the chosen race of Jehovah, and God will crush their enemies.

So you have 2 cultures that 1/ believes it is the chosen ones and special, 2/ have been brutalised by anti Muslim pro west/crusader forces that are seeking to destroy them.

The situation is compounded and complicated by the fact that there isn't black and white, there are just shades of grey, both sides have their ultra hard liners who would wish the other side totally eliminated, and your reasonable people who recognise that there are nice ordinary people on both sides who can live together, and respect differences among them, and that not all Palestinians are bombers and all Jews wish to nuke Palestine.

So in the world, apart from localised differences, we have an infinite spectrum of types, from one end to the other with all in between.

So I would argue, not knowing about my history too well, that Arab anti Semitism(Jewish) is to do with 2 different religions, each thinking it is THE WAY, and is different to Nazi anti semitism.

So don't get confused when people LEGITIMATELY attack the actions despicable acts of the Israeli government with being labelled anti Jew, as they are not the same thing.

Likewise criticising Hamas despicable acts, with the poor opressed Palestinian peoples.

However it is a war of sorts, and leaders are ripe pickings, wisdom notwithstanding.

It is interesting to note, how comparative the koran and the bible are.

If any of this is in error please correct me

Isn't international relations fascinating?