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#521
07-30-2006, 06:57 AM
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Qana
After an IAF air strike on Kafr Qana, in which at least 50 Lebanese - including children - were killed, Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora demanded an immediate and unconditional cease fire, Israel Radio reported
--------------------------------- Protesters angry over an IAF air strike in Qana that killed up to 50 refugees broke into the main UN building in the Lebanese capital Sunday, burning UN and American flags. Around 500 protesters massed outside the building, which was empty on the weekend day. Some pushed through police barricade, smashed windows and broke inside the building. Outside, demonstrators chanted slogans against Israel and the United States and denounced Arab governments for not doing enough to stop Israel's 19-day bombardment of Lebanon. --------------------------------- Jordan's King Abdullah II voiced his strongest criticism of his Israeli peace partner on Sunday, saying an attack on a southern Lebanese village was "criminal aggression" which targeted innocent civilians. At least 60 people were killed Sunday in an Israeli air strike on Qana - the deadliest attack in 19 days of fighting. The IDF said it targeted the village because the militant Hizbullah has repeatedly launched rockets from the area on Israel. Abdullah condemned "the ugly crime perpetrated by Israeli forces in Qana, which led to the killing of innocent civilians, including a large number of children and women," said a statement released by the king's press office. "This criminal aggression constitutes a blatant violation of the law and all international conventions," the king said. ------------------------------------- US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday she is "deeply saddened by the terrible loss of innocent life" after an attack on a village in southern Lebanon but did not call for an immediate cease-fire in the fighting between Israel and Hizbullah. Rice said she called Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora to say she would postpone a visit to Beirut on Sunday, and that she had work to do in Jerusalem to end the fighting. "We are also pushing for an urgent end to the current hostilities, but the views of the parties on how to achieve this are different," she said. --------------------------------- Hizbullah vowed to revenge the attack on Qana on Sunday afternoon. "The slaughter in Qana will not pass without reaction," a Hizbullah spokesman said on Al-Manar television. ----------------------------------- Britain's foreign secretary said an IAF strike on southern Lebanon Sunday that killed some 50 civilians was a tragedy and a setback for any peace deal. "We need to go back and pick up the pieces," Britain's Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett told Sky News in an interview Sunday, promising to continue working with all players in finding a solution to end the violence. Beckett, however, stopped short of calling for a cease-fire. "We have repeatedly called on the Israelis to act proportionately," Beckett said. -------------------------------------- Following the deadly IAF strike on Qana, Gideon Meir, a senior Foreign Ministry official, said on Sunday that Hizbullah was using their own civilian population as human shields. Meir said that Israel deeply regretted the loss of any civilian life, especially that of innocent children. "This is not the code of conduct of the Israeli army," added Meir. ----------------------------------------- France on Sunday condemned an early morning IAf strike on the southern Lebanese town of Qana that left as many as 60 dead, calling it an unjustifiable act and demanding an immediate cease-fire. President Jacques Chirac learned "with dismay of the act of violence that cost the lives of numerous innocent victims, notably woman and children, in Qana overnight," his office said in a statement. "France condemns this unjustifiable action, which shows more than ever the need to move toward an immediate cease-fire, without which other such dramas can only be repeated," it said. ------------------------------- Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that the area was a focal point for the firing of Katyusha rockets on Kiryat Shmona and Afula. He said that from the outset of the conflict "hundreds of rockets have been fired from the Qana area." Olmert stressed that there was no IDF policy of targeting innocent civilians, as opposed to Hizbullah that has launched rockets "with the aim of murdering innocent civilians in northern Israel." A high-ranking IAF officer said that the IDF warned the residents of Qana to evacuate the village in anticipation of the airstrikes on Katyusha launchers. 
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#523
07-30-2006, 07:06 AM
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Re: Qana
Likud head Binyamin Netanyahu said, "Civilians were given enough time to leave."
"Israel is trying to minimize civilian casualties," he insisted, "otherwise the number of casualties would be in the tens of thousands."
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#524
07-30-2006, 07:39 AM
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Re: Israel\'s Attack on Lebanon and Hezbollah
They bombed the tarmac and bombed it again after repairs. They bombed roads, bridges, factories, apartments, houses, fuel supplies and all manner of vehicles, even ambulances. They told civilians to flee and them bombed them when they did. They flattened entire villages. They bombed civilian targets so deliberately and indiscriminately -- the overwhelming majority of Israeli-caused casualties are civilians -- that the UN's high commissioner (Canadian) warned that Israeli leaders were facing personal criminal responsibility.
Israel has no intention of committing the amount of forces necessary to defeat and disarm Hizballah; they're on the verge of admitting as much. But it has plenty enough firepower to punish millios of Lebanonese for living in the country where Hizballah exists.
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#525
07-30-2006, 08:55 AM
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Syria
While Israel is not interested in opening a front against Syria, if President Bashar Assad decides to attack Israel, the IDF will respond harshly and with its full might, a high-raking IDF officer in the Northern Command told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday.
"We are continuing with our message that we are not interested in fighting with Syria," the officer said, "But we are fully prepared for a Syrian attack, in the case of which we will strike back extremely hard." Defense officials told the Post last week that they were receiving indications from the United States that the US would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria.
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#527
07-30-2006, 09:37 AM
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Re: Syria
Syria's foreign minister described as "totally unacceptable" the United States' refusal to support calls for an immediate cease-fire in the Mideast conflict, according to an interview published Sunday.
Rather than urge a quick truce, Washington has pressed for a settlement that addresses enduring issues between Lebanon and Israel and disables Hizbullah, whose capture of two IDF soldiers triggered the crisis. "This position is totally unacceptable," Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem was quoted as telling the weekly Der Spiegel. "At the moment, what is important is the saving of human lives, and not whether Israel or Hizbullah can realize their war aims."
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#528
07-30-2006, 09:41 AM
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Re: Crazy
[ QUOTE ]
Hi JMan: I actually think there might be another reason. I don't care what the election results may have been because I don't see how you can have real democracy when the political parties each have an army that is currently shooting at their political opponents. So one possible reason for the Hamas victory is that they were a little better at intimidating the voting population then their political opponents. What are your thoughts? Best wishes, Mason [/ QUOTE ] It shouldn't be overlooked that Hamas does charity work. It didn't start as an armed organization, and is not exclusively an armed organization. I don't mean to imply that they are a benign organization. They aren't. However the situation in palestine isn't one were hamas sprung out of nowhere with a bunch on guns and forced people to vote for them a la some right wing central american junta backed by the CIA. Hamas has existed for a while, and they are going to be there to stay. The only question is: in what form? Will their cease fires be respected by Israel and the united states? My personal hope is that a secular leftist political organization smashes the power of Hamas from within palestine. People forget that in the first intifada, secular leftist methods of struggle such as strikes and occasional armed attacks on soldiers were dominant. Terrorism against the Israeli public was an extreme rarity. I wish someone would put me in charge over there. [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img]
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#530
07-30-2006, 10:11 AM
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Re: Let\'s not succumb to moral relativism
[ QUOTE ]
In order precisely to halt the descent into such an abyss and hold fast to higher humanistic principles, there are various agreements between nations, eg GCP, however idealistically or utopically formulated, which try to claim for Man a somewhat less savage mode of conduct. [/ QUOTE ]All these agreements are silly and are simply a matter of convenience because when push comes to shove there is not an army on earth that will follow them. To see the silliness we need to only look in our own history and our CURRENT thinking towards that history. The large majority of U.S. citizens have zero problem with the mass fire bombings and nuclear attacks of World war II that specifically targeted huge populations of civilians. The U.S. military even tested the bombs on Japanese civilian clothing and houses in order to maximize burning. How can there be a greater atrocity in war. Now, maybe we can try to understand the thinking of the U.S. population towards this in the 40s. But, the thinking TODAY has not changed. So, we smart bomb and precision bomb only because we dont have to target civilians YET. But, the second we deem it neccessary we will bomb civilians without a moment's hesitation and the American public will have zero problem with it. For example, lets say we get in a major war with China and the U.S. itself is truly threatened. If the U.S. military wipes out a few Chinese cities to end the conflict and if such bombings are successful we will maybe shed a few tears over the horror but in the end we will have no problem with the purposeful targeting, killing, and terrorizing of civilians. TODAY, people are totally comfortable and are willing to justify the targeting of civilians when it was the U.S. doing the targeting. If what you say is true then where is the outrage at our own actions? Why do people not denounce these past acts as wrong? [ QUOTE ] It reduces every moral argument to a quest about who's stronger and who's weaker. [/ QUOTE ]It has ALWAYS been about who is strong and who is weak. It has never been about anything more. We like to think of "good guys" and "bad guys" only because it makes us feel better. For example, we like to think of WW2 as taking on the butchers of Germany and we fail to remember that our partner against Germany was the biggest butcher of all.
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