“What are you trying to achieve by sending rockets?” Mr. Abbas asked on Palestine TV, without explicitly naming Hamas, which recently lent its backing to his government after a seven-year rift. “We prefer to fight with wisdom and politics.”
Hamas officials assailed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for his criticism of the persistent rocket attacks on Israel, Israel Radio reported on Saturday.
Leaders of the Islamist movement which rules Gaza said that Abbas, who heads the rival Fatah faction, was “aiding the enemy” by making his statement. Hamas accused the PA chief of “acting as a third party” while branding him “a criminal” and “a Likud member.”
Here’s what Abbas’ Fatah had to say to Israelis as hundreds of rockets were being fired at them from Gaza: “Death will reach you from the south to the north. Flee our country and you won’t die. The KN-103 rocket is on its way toward you.”
I think I’ll take my chances with the Jewish newspaper.
The Abbas (“Abu Mazen”) and Fatah narratives remain constrained or dead-ended in light of the financially and morally bankrupting war on Israel prosecuted by Hamas: either Fatah retakes Gaza, transforms its government, and writes paychecks to it, or it stalls right where it is, pleading for peace while continuing its anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist campaigns for the destruction of Israel (an act of barbaric theft making way for the renewed persecution of Jewry)
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/182637#.U8Uy4JRdV8E – 7/6/2014: Fatah threatened death against Israelis by telling them to “prepare body bags,” writing on its official Facebook page Monday “Sons of Zion, this is an oath to the Lord of the Heavens: Prepare all the bags you can for your body parts.”
The piece, titled “Lowest deeds from loftiest heights,” disregards the extensive efforts made by the Israel Defense Forces to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza Strip, as well as Hamas’ repeated use of Gazans as human shields.
“In other words, Abbas demanded that the Ezzedeen Al-Qassam Brigades be dismantled. Needless to say, from Hamas’ perspective, that was not going to happen. And there was something else Abbas did, he refused to pay the salaries of some 46,000 Hamas government officials and police officers.”
Clashes in the mixed Muslim-Christian city, usually last for at least four hours every night and in recent days have pushed Palestinian Authority police to appear. When they do, however, they are able to do very little and stand armed but largely impotent against young men wielding rocks. This is in sharp contrast to the Israelis who have moved increasingly from utilising tear gas and rubber-coated-steel-bullets, to instead shooting off deadly live ammunition. In recent days, at least 20 protestors have been shot with live fire, mostly in the feet and legs.
Seemingly, then, the only lasting effects of air strikes are civilian casualties. As a recent Washington Post editorial argues, “The latest mini-war between Israel and the Hamas movement is as unwinnable for either side as previous rounds in 2009 and 2012.”
As usual, Washington’s response to the Israeli bombardment of Gaza has been little more than justification and support of Israel’s “right to defend itself,” as exemplified by the U.S. Administration’s stock condemnation of Hamas rocket attacks on Tuesday. What White House spokesman John Earnest failed to clarify, however, is whether Palestinians are also afforded the right to protection — and who exactly Washington is expecting to provide that protection.
Evil starts with a lie, and lying has to do always with hiding something or getting something.
We may not think of failing to mention the Hamas tactic and strategy to place noncombatants between its weapons manufacturing and storage elements and the Israeli Defense Forces, but, and we call as much a “sin of omission”, that’s exactly what it is.
To even think that sacrificing families and their children to portray them as victims of so-called Israeli aggression should pull a sympathetic response from anyone in Washington — apart from the Muslim Brotherhood — seems to me breathtaking.
http://www.danielpipes.org/14574/israel-hamas-war – 7/11/2014: “What explains this role reversal? Are Islamists so fanatical that they don’t mind losing? Are Zionists too worried about loss of life to fight? / Actually, Hamas leaders are quite rational. Periodically (2006, 2008, 2012), they decide to make war on Israel knowing full well that they will lose on the military battlefield but optimistic about winning in the political arena. Israeli leaders, conversely, assume they will win militarily but fear political defeat – bad press, United Nations resolutions, and so on.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/hamas-human-shields/ – 7/14/2014; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-kohn/operation-human-shield_b_157837.html – 1/14/2009: ” When terrorists use areas such as schools to teach their children hatred and use places of worship to hide and store weapons, it is IMPOSSIBLE to keep civilians safe” (note from 2009 — the last time).
http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/07/surreal_in_the_middle_east_hamass_human_shields.html – 7/14/2014: “As with previous assaults and conflicts orchestrated by an array of regional Islamic terrorist groups against Israel, not much attention is being paid to the way Hamas uses its own Palestinian citizens as human shields, or its deliberate and intentioned strikes on Israeli civilian neighborhoods and population centers.”
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28302539 – 7/14/2014: “Palestinian officials say at least 175 people in Gaza have been killed by Israeli air strikes since the offensive began last Tuesday. / Israel says nearly 1,000 rockets have been fired from Gaza in that time.”
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=18803 – 7/15/2014: “The piece, titled “Lowest deeds from loftiest heights,” disregards the extensive efforts made by the Israel Defense Forces to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza Strip, as well as Hamas’ repeated use of Gazans as human shields.”
Documentary producer Corey Gil-Shuster has a raft of clips on YouTube. I happened to be watching this one from February 2014 this afternoon and thought it might fit in here. The Islamist Muslim claim focused on the Jewish persecution of Muslims would seem to play primarily with and to the criminal, deluded, and ignorant — or some combination thereof. Are there issues? Yes. Are they civilizational? Not really. The Arab barbarism displayed by the artifice of the Palestinian liberation movement has been consistent over the years, but it would seem the liberation wanted is liberation from either a racist pan-Arab nationalism beloved of dictators or a religious fanaticism reliant on a deeply anachronistic and decontextualized approach to Islam. The refugees of 1948 have been drowned between those two political streams.
“The final chapter in the destruction of Hitler’s Third Reich began on April 16, 1945 when Stalin unleashed the brutal power of 20 armies, 6,300 tanks and 8,500 aircraft with the objective of crushing German resistance and capturing Berlin.”
The Japanese had the good fortune of having a religion and an emperor one step removed from battle. It took _two_ atomic bombs on top of the decimation of the state to bring the emperor to surrender a martial ambition that could not be left to fester and redevelop.
Think about these immense wars of the previous century: Germany — untold dead, rails cut, ports bombed, army defeated in area after area after area — and right to the last, until out of bullets (except two for Adolph and Eva — the last decent thing he ever did was marry and right afterward attended the double-murder, one of them his own), the Nazis fought. For Japan, battered by allied bombing raids, also pushed back, Hiroshima, where the first bomb was dropped, didn’t produced surrender. It took Nagasaki, and no one doubts that “Curtis” would have continued until nothing was left.
There’s madness in the heads of “malignant narcissists”, and some really cannot believe they’re evil or that they are losing until they’re gone, and I’m not certain even then that they’re convinced.
Hamas secures weapons in a variety of built noncombatant / non-military locations. Israel delivers warning calls and warning shots, and then what it bombs it destroys in its entirety.
Have the “bug-out bag” read and (even if without) flee: when that army comes knockin’, get out of its way.
Not coincidentally, Pakistan’s Defense Forces have been active recently in North Waziristan”
(CNN) — Pakistani troops launched a ground offensive against militants in the capital of the country’s North Waziristan area Monday, starting a new phase of a 16-day fight that has seen more than 450,000 people flee the area.
Hamas has embraced a genocidal mission based in the theft of religious precepts and related successionary ambition. It’s very flattering to itself, and while it has gotten fat and built mansions on skimming funds and collecting tunnel tolls and various forms of taxation, it has demonstrated its love of people by making sure to put noncombatants between its operations and “blast and battle”.
The New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left (see “International Solidarity Movement” for example) has been getting money from somewhere and puffing itself up for just this kind of glorious man-the-barricades moment. It too doesn’t offer much beyond the grandstanding.
As I have read that Allah favors those who restrain themselves, I may do just that and refrain a while from posting my own opinion from elsewhere, which practice has just gotten weird.
I have a blog, for pete’s sake!
My prayers to Gaza noncombatants, non-Hamas residents who have asked for jobs, built businesses, taken care of their homes, and lived peacefully and would go on doing so were it not for the fire starters among them who literally bring war into their homes.
Recommended Search Strings
Gaza, Hamas, Governance
Gaza, Hamas, Human Rights
Gaza, Hamas, Human Shields
Gaza, Hamas, Mansions
Gaza, Hamas, Millionaires
Gaza, Hamas, Weapons
Assorted Previews
Warning tactics used by the Israel Defense Forces to apparently avoid civilian casualties in Gaza have been captured on camera. In a video published on LiveLeak, an IDF aircraft fires a loud, nonlethal bomb on a building to alert residents that they’re in the area of a target, allowing them to leave quickly.
. . . as Israel has stepped up its efforts to try and spare civilians even as it seeks to silence the terrorist fire, Hamas has also increased its efforts to ensure that as many inhabitants of Gaza as possible are hurt in the fighting.
Smuggled Syrian-made rockets based on a Chinese design have boosted Hamas’ 10,000-strong arsenal which is dominated by crude homemade devices, officials and experts say.
A surface-to-surface weapon that struck the coastal town Hadera – 30 miles north of Tel Aviv and 70 miles from the Gaza Strip – is an “M-302 type rocket” similar to a shipment of rockets Israel intercepted at sea in March, the Israeli Defense Forces said Wednesday.
Hamas faces an unprecedented economic and political crisis. The Egyptian government regards it as an enemy, has clamped down on smuggling activity, and kept the Rafah border crossing mostly closed. It has lost its Syrian base and Iranian support as a result of the Syrian civil war. Now its authority is weakening inside Gaza: it is on the point of bankruptcy and has been challenged by jihadist groups buoyed up by the success of Isis.
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