04 Monday Aug 2014
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IDF forces in the Gaza Strip found a Hamas manual on “Urban Warfare,” which belonged to the Shuja’iya Brigade of Hamas’ military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades. The manual explains how the civilian population can be used against IDF forces and reveals that Hamas knows the IDF is committed to minimizing harm to civilians.
http://www.idfblog.com/blog/2014/08/04/captured-hamas-combat-manual-explains-benefits-human-shields/ – 8/4/2014.
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03 Sunday Aug 2014
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It is perhaps less risky to fill three minutes with gruesome post-mortems than to film Hamas fighters in their tracks, but it is not reporting. Preying on human emotions as a proxy for journalism, even where sprinkled with facts, may be good for ratings – like fear and sex — but it has turned too much of the coverage out of Gaza into little more than snuff with a halo..
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philippe-assouline/pornography-of-pain-why-t_b_5639741.html – 8/1/2014.
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03 Sunday Aug 2014
Are they even aware that most of the Christian community in Gaza have fled –out of fear of Hamas? Gaza Christians were and are driven away by intimidation, death threats, forced conversions and scrutiny by Hamas “Torquemadas” who check to make sure these new converts are attending Mosque on a regular basis. Have they seen the videos recently smuggled out showing Hamas henchmen beating up Palestinian men, women and children trying to evacuate their homes, (as the IDF asked them to do), and being driven back inside by Hamas henchmen so their deaths can become fodder for naïve, unquestioning western eyes? For every Palestinian – except their most dedicated supporters, Hamas rule in Gaza has become akin to the inquisition. Has it ever occurred to these new lefties that their unquestioning support of Gaza is actually enabling Hamas and other similar tyrants to continue doing what they do best – namely rule through intimidation and terror?
http://israelsvoice.com/article.php?id=294&t=1407101450 – 8/3/2014
For good reason, I refer to it as the “New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left”.
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01 Friday Aug 2014
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I’ve started mouthing about what sounds like the title of a political thriller: “The Gaza Suzerainty”. That is the only decent near answer not only for peace but for humanity. It would also set off a new adventure for Gazans, specifically embracing the challenge of reinventing themselves as the residents of a modern city-state with all of the obligation, privileges, and rights accorded any person in any open society free to truly determine its course. That solution would end arguments about absorption in some way as well as the destruction of Israel for the most heinous of causes, either “pan-Arab nationalism” (ask al-Assad about that) or a fascist Islamism.
None else dare whisper it: suzerainty.
Auspices: responsible Egyptian-Israeli partnership not only controlling the foreign affairs of the city state as well as present martial ambitions and capabilities, but Gaza’s redevelopment opportunities as a democratic and peaceful society.
This post began as an aside and would seem to have been overtaken by the combination of Hamas intransigence and Israeli vision.
This showed up in the feed yesterday, and as I keep the Sabbath, I encountered just a few minutes ago.
Late last week, BackChannels also noted that Israel had built and opened an emergency field hospital for Gazans, and that it was already providing services to those who could get to it.
Israel has now long provided similar field hospital services to Syrians who could reach facilities with their wounds or other needs and encounter a medical ethic in which the person and the medical problem receive attention, not the politics.
Loosely related to Hamas’s short history of governance on the strip:
“They drive Mercedes’ and, you know, if we didn’t have money from Farah’s parents, we wouldn’t have anything to eat. I have been unemployed for six months and of course we can’t work in Israel. The SOBs are taking everything for themselves,” he complained bitterly. “But luckily, now there’s Hamas. And they will fix the corruption. I’m going to vote for them in the elections.”
More has popped up on the web as regards Hamas behavior with its own constituents and with the media:
http://www.thomaswictor.com/massacre-at-shijaiyah/ – 7/31/2014.
http://www.thomaswictor.com/the-un-school-at-jabalia/ – 8/2/2014.
In psychology, a narcissists effort to manipulate a target with false information is referred to as “gaslighting”. In psychology, also, the same may be limited to the intimate sphere of the person. In political psychology, it would appear that a movement’s effort to misdirect attention and mislead a large public, including its own constituency, may amount to “Gaslighting” with that capital “G”.
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01 Friday Aug 2014
Jordanian Palestinian leader Mudar Zahran has been arguing for years for a revolutionary version of the “Jordanian Option”, the idea that the Palestinians should be absorbed by and governed by Jordan, an idea pursued by Yasser Arafat with disastrous consequences, but which in Zahran’s vision promotes a democratic pro-Semitic Jordan.
As King Abdullah II of Jordan would have to abdicate to get to the first leg of such an adjustment, Zahran generally argues his case from London.
Nonetheless, with Palestinian bona fides, Zahran has stepped out of the box that keeps the “middle east conflict” oscillating between temporary accommodation and relative quiet and then the rounds of brutal violence unleashed by the passions fueled by Arab hate in some proportion of the refugee populations. The dictator generally boasts — and being delusional may believe — that everyone is behind him (and everyone loves him too), but the more level-headed among empiricists may rightly query that boast: truly, provably, how many constituents within the mafia state of theofascist Hamas deeply hate and resent its existence and its power over their lives?
As all autocracies are no-go zones for honest pollsters, no one really knows.
However, with this “different kind of war”, states share in their enmity reliance on general communications networks and devices and word gets in and word gets out — and then it moves quickly.
So one may take it on Mudar Zahran’s word, “Most Gazans Have Had Enough With Hamas”, until Gazans are free of Hamas and free to speak freely.
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01 Friday Aug 2014
The rebirth of the Iranian-led axis provides the essential ingredient for a new explanation of Hamas’s decision to go to war with Israel.
Recent commentary, however, has placed Hamas’s decision in the context of the regional rivalry between the camp of states that back the Muslim Brotherhood, on the one hand, and Egypt, backed by the camp of anti-Muslim Brotherhood states, on the other.
https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/558264-hamass-return-to-the-resistance-axis – 8/1/2014.
01 Friday Aug 2014
As the conflict in Gaza mounts, and hopes for ceasefire, let alone peace, seem to fade into the fog of war, my thoughts took me today back to Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president who, against all odds, made Egypt the first Arab country to officially sign a peace treaty with Israel.
I was but a teenager when Sadat announced he will be visiting Israel. I remember the tension. Some conspiracy theorists in Israel predicted that the door of the Egyptian Presidential airplane will open, and instead of Sadat, a group of terrorists will burst out, shooting at the top Israeli leaders who were awaiting to greet the honorable enemy, turned into a friendly guest. That, of course, didn’t happen. But what I was thinking about today was what must have gone in Sadat’s head. He was an Arab leader who waged an almost successful war against the Jewish state (the…
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01 Friday Aug 2014
Because of the enforced isolation, much including Arab unwillingness to integrate the same, the residents of Gaza, “Gazans”, a term I am seeing more frequently, are positioned in time to become their own people in their own city-state.
When Hamas is gone — and it appears Hamas is working on that — the culture of Gaza may be open both to Egypt and Israel. Israel, incidentally, may have afterward plans for Gaza in the form of services made ready, starting with medicine — there’s already a built emergency field hospital for Gazans far into construction.
Actually, Israel’s emergency hospital unit for Gaza is open.
So how is this working out?
Walla reports that Hamas has actively prevented injured Gazans from going to the hospital to be treated by Israel. Even worse, on Wednesday Hamas shot ten mortars at the hospital!
Yes, Hamas is targeting a hospital, something that the “human rights” community seems not to care much about in this case.
UPDATE: Yes, the hospital is live and treating Gazans who manage to get there.
http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2014/07/hamas-shells-field-hospital-set-up-to.html#.U9u08-NdV8E – 7/23/2014
From 2012:
At 2:05:
A senior Israeli cardiologist told the group that there are no dilemmas for Israeli doctors in treating children who may be the offspring of enemy combatants: “We treat them as human beings. We look at them as human beings. We see their families in their hour of dealing with an extremely sick ill child. This is a humanitarian program.”
http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/11/18/israeli-doctors-treat-hamas-pm-haniyehs-granddaughter/ – 11/18/2013.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/haniyehs-mother-in-law-treated-in-israel/ – 6/3/2014.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/06/15/wife-of-palestinian-president-mahmud-abbas-being-treated-in-israeli-hospital/ – 6/15/2014.
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BackChannels 