Israel And The Palestinians (now with added Iran/Lebanon)

[Black_and_White_Stripes]

I should add the other mind-blowing segment of that video starts at 6:00. 

 

Edited Monday at 23:08 by Black_and_White_Stripes

[GordonS]

3 hours ago, Black_and_White_Stripes said:

I'm not sure that's a valid comparison. My understanding is the armed insurgents who wanted to overthrow Assad were largely not Syrian. The West (and Israel) didn't like him because of his alliances with Russia and Iran. Like Saddam and Ghaddafi, Assad's not a good guy, but he's no worse than many other leaders. It's just that he's not aligned with our interests.

That's not true. The Syrian civil war started during the Arab Spring and in all of those uprisings the West wanted the reformers to overthrow the dictators, even those that were aligned with the West like Mubarak. They didn't give material support to the uprisings at first though, they weren't that stupid for once. They later intervened in Libya and in Syria because civilians were being targeted. Later they kept intervening in Syria but against ISIS because of the international threat they posed through terrorism, not against Assad. By then all hopes of a grass-roots, pro-democracy uprising had long gone as the country fractured into control mostly by Assad, Hezbollah, ISIS and a load of warlords.

The difference between Assad and other leaders just as bad at that time was there was a realistic hope of toppling him. If he'd been knocked off within a few weeks then there could have been hope for Syria as a stable, peaceful country. Maybe. No chance since though.

It's tempting to see everything that happens in the Middle East as a consequence of Western action (or inaction). 

[Sergeant Wilson]

7 hours ago, Black_and_White_Stripes said:

think tanks

Whatever next!

[welshbairn]

4 hours ago, GordonS said:

The difference between Assad and other leaders just as bad at that time was there was a realistic hope of toppling him. If he'd been knocked off within a few weeks then there could have been hope for Syria as a stable, peaceful country. Maybe. .

I doubt it. Assad's regime largely represented the Allawite minority, a Shia offshoot around 12% of the population. If Assad had been toppled the UAE and Saudi backed Sunni opposition would have likely attempted to massacre them, with Iran and Hezbollah intervening. The Western backed cuddly liberal student types only existed for the cameras, it was the hard core Islamists doing the fighting. Thankfully for Assad the opposition spent more effort fighting each other than the regime, he pretty well left ISIS alone and let the Kurds deal with them.

[Granny Danger]

9 hours ago, Black_and_White_Stripes said:

I'm not sure that's a valid comparison. My understanding is the armed insurgents who wanted to overthrow Assad were largely not Syrian. The West (and Israel) didn't like him because of his alliances with Russia and Iran. Like Saddam and Ghaddafi, Assad's not a good guy, but he's no worse than many other leaders. It's just that he's not aligned with our interests.

What people don't seem to realise is that the West's foreign policy is shaped by lobby groups and think tanks - e.g. Project for the New American Century & AIPAC. 

This is a video from pro-Israeli The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. This blew my mind when I first saw it (skip to 2:48, the third segment). He actually talks publicly about how they can engineer a war with Iran. Just consider how screwed up this is:

 

It might be screwed up but it’s not mind blowing.  He’s just saying the quiet stuff out loud.

[Zetterlund]

1 hour ago, welshbairn said:

I doubt it. Assad's regime largely represented the Allawite minority, a Shia offshoot around 12% of the population. If Assad had been toppled the UAE and Saudi backed Sunni opposition would have likely attempted to massacre them, with Iran and Hezbollah intervening. The Western backed cuddly liberal student types only existed for the cameras, it was the hard core Islamists doing the fighting. Thankfully for Assad the opposition spent more effort fighting each other than the regime, he pretty well left ISIS alone and let the Kurds deal with them.

Mostly agree apart from the last bit, although it become the case more in the later years as the remaining ISIS pockets mostly inhabited the various disputed areas far away from Danascus. The scrapping between the Syrian army and ISIS was pretty intense and not looking good for Assad until Russia waded in. Almost guaranteed that Syria would have become a failed state of rival headchopping factions had this not happened.

[GordonS]

1 hour ago, welshbairn said:

I doubt it. Assad's regime largely represented the Allawite minority, a Shia offshoot around 12% of the population. If Assad had been toppled the UAE and Saudi backed Sunni opposition would have likely attempted to massacre them, with Iran and Hezbollah intervening. The Western backed cuddly liberal student types only existed for the cameras, it was the hard core Islamists doing the fighting. Thankfully for Assad the opposition spent more effort fighting each other than the regime, he pretty well left ISIS alone and let the Kurds deal with them.

Not at first it wasn't. At first it was a broad grass-roots movement like that in Egypt. But what happened is what often happens in civil wars - as the fighting gets serious the bampots thrive on the opportunity and the ordinary people have to hide or flee.

As for a massacre of the Allawite, that's speculative. Assad claimed it to justify him slaughtering civilians, which doesn't make it true. He's getting Putin to slaughter the Sunni civilians anyway, about which Western media couldn't care less until Russia invaded Ukraine.

[welshbairn]

6 minutes ago, GordonS said:

Not at first it wasn't. At first it was a broad grass-roots movement like that in Egypt.

I'd say the parallel was closer to Iraq, except in that case it was the Shia majority rebelling against the ruling Sunni minority. The Iranian revolution and the growth of Wahabi fundamentalism pushing the Sunni cause has turned nearly every middle eastern conflict into a proxy sectarian battle between Saudi and the Gulf states versus Iran, except where Israel complicates matters. The history of opposition to Assad's regime has always been between hard core Islamist Sunni versus a relatively secular regime.

[Freedom Farter]

A point on one of the clips in that video:

The child there is barefoot and you see the children behind her are too. This is something I've noticed when watching footage of the displaced Gazans either in the tent camps or walking with their belongings, that the children are so often barefoot. These are very poor people. They can't even provide footwear for their children. 

 

[Black_and_White_Stripes]

9 hours ago, Sergeant Wilson said:

Whatever next!

That should've been 'think tanks' - The Washington Institute purports to be a think tank, as did the PNAC. What they really do is formulate reasons to justify US 'intervention' (also known as war).

 

Quote

 

Academic Peter Dale Scott subsequently wrote

"[PNAC's] ideology was summarized in a major position paper, Rebuilding America's Defenses, in 2000. This document advocated a global Pax Americana unrestrained by international law ..

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century

[Wee-Bey]

No shout out for Davie Cameron's 'moderate jihadis'?

[Melanius Mullarkey]

At least Keith’s on the ball.

 

[Sergeant Wilson]

1 hour ago, Black_and_White_Stripes said:

That should've been 'think tanks

I think about little else.

[Black_and_White_Stripes]

I just saw that the ban on Russia's chess players from international competitions, has been upheld. This made me wonder why Israel's athletes and chess players are not suffering the same fate. A quick internet search came up with the following quote:

Quote

“This is not a normal war. The war in Ukraine has killed 500 kids in two years and the war in Gaza has killed over 10,000 in less than five months. We have seen wars before but this is something that is a dark stain on our shared humanity.”

It's from The Guardian, which is not politically neutral, and there's no way of verifying its accuracy, but I think most folk would accept that far more civilians have died in Gaza than Ukraine. Indeed, I don't think it would be a stretch to say that the Russians have been far more constrained than the Israelis, in terms of the targeting of civilians.

Of course, no reasonable person can justify the events of 7th October last year, but turning Gaza to rubble is massively disproportionate and is essentially punishing civilians. Yet, by allowing Israel to compete in a variety of international competitions (did they not even participate in the Eurovision Song Contest?), whilst excluding Russia, the message is that Israel's war is justifiable, even if it means the deaths of thousands of civilians, whilst Russia's is an act of aggression. 

Tangentially related, I just had a look at Labour Friends of Israel and I was quite surprised by some of the names:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Friends_of_Israel

Edited 13 hours ago by Black_and_White_Stripes
Added: 'in terms of the targeting of civilians.'

[DiegoDiego]

I was in Syria in late 2011. I met many everyday Syrians on both sides of the war. Of course, outside actors will have put their thumb on the scale, but having been out there and heard the stories first hand, there were a great many locals willing to lay down their lives regardless of what Paris, Moscow, London or Washington thought.

[Black_and_White_Stripes]

On 17/09/2024 at 16:56, Nkomo-A-Gogo said:

No love for the Israeli government here but you have to hand it to them there, that's top notch. 

 

Like @Nkomo-A-Gogo, I will get downvoted for this post, but it was a very cleverly planned operation. I'm just reading an article in the New York Times about it:

 

'It was clear, a distressed Hezbollah chief, Hassan Nasrallah, said, that Israel was using cellphone networks to pinpoint the locations of his operatives.

“You ask me where is the agent,” Mr. Nasrallah told his followers in a publicly televised address in February. “I tell you that the phone in your hands, in your wife’s hands, and in your children’s hands is the agent.”

Then he issued a plea.

“Bury it,” Mr. Nasrallah said. “Put it in an iron box and lock it.”

He had been pushing for years for Hezbollah to invest instead in pagers, which for all their limited capabilities could receive data without giving away a user’s location or other compromising information, according to American intelligence assessments.

Israeli intelligence officials saw an opportunity.

Even before Mr. Nasrallah decided to expand pager usage, Israel had put into motion a plan to establish a shell company that would pose as an international pager producer.

By all appearances, B.A.C. Consulting was a Hungary-based company that was under contract to produce the devices on behalf of a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo. In fact, it was part of an Israeli front, according to three intelligence officers briefed on the operation. They said at least two other shell companies were created as well to mask the real identities of the people creating the pagers: Israeli intelligence officers.

B.A.C. did take on ordinary clients, for which it produced a range of ordinary pagers. But the only client that really mattered was Hezbollah, and its pagers were far from ordinary. Produced separately, they contained batteries laced with the explosive PETN, according to the three intelligence officers.

The pagers began shipping to Lebanon in the summer of 2022 in small numbers, but production was quickly ramped up after Mr. Nasrallah denounced cellphones.'

So, the Israelis anticipated that Hezbollah would begin to use pagers instead of phones and created a company that produced deadly pagers! 

'On Tuesday, the order was given to activate the pagers.

To set off the explosions, according to three intelligence and defense officials, Israel triggered the pagers to beep and sent a message to them in Arabic that appeared as though it had come from Hezbollah’s senior leadership.

Seconds later, Lebanon was in chaos.'

 

Whilst some pagers could have been sold on, or accessed by people who were not Hezbollah agents, this was more discriminate than the bombing campaigns in Gaza. Surely most Lebanese citizens will not want a pager, preferring a mobile phone? Therefore, is it reasonable to expect the vast majority would be Hezbollah?

 

Edited 11 hours ago by Black_and_White_Stripes

[Claudia Gentile]

It seems Hezbollah has various purposes. There's the jihadi paramilitary wing but they also have political elements and the social aspects such as education, health as well as various other aspects.

While the pager explosions would be in theory targeting their military wing it is isn't inconceivable that a large element of those affected had no direct role in the military side of things.

It seems like an overreaching organisation modelled on the Iranian model of government.

[Silvio Tattiescone]

5 minutes ago, Claudia Gentile said:

It seems Hezbollah has various purposes. There's the jihadi paramilitary wing but they also have political elements and the social aspects such as education, health as well as various other aspects.

While the pager explosions would be in theory targeting their military wing it is isn't inconceivable that a large element of those affected had no direct role in the military side of things.

It seems like an overreaching organisation modelled on the Iranian model of government.

The Nazi party was the same. 

[Claudia Gentile]

3 minutes ago, Silvio Tattiescone said:

The Nazi party was the same. 

In a general sense I suppose so as Communinst China is and the Soviet Union was.

Maybe that's how Israel justify the attack, whether you agree with them or not.

However, that doesn't make the pager attacks indiscriminate as not everyone involved is part of their military arm. As it is being posited as an attack on that aspect of their controlling regime.

[Claudia Gentile]

Meanwhile, back in Israel.