zazen

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Everything posted by zazen

  1. @Nivsch I'm not against Israel, but its current form and its actions are against the interest of Israelis and to a wider extent Jews who live abroad threatened by increasing anti Semitism. Israelis have the IDF to protect them in mostly Jewish cities in Israel - what about the Jews living abroad in multicultural places - the arrogance and emboldened far right of Israel and its reactions to the Hamas attack put them at risk worldwide where they IDF don't exist to protect them. They also put at risk Israel itself because of the complacency arrogance has brought them and the thinking that US will back them no matter what. I live in a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood in London mixed with Muslims, I have Israeli friends who live in Israel and some from the West who only go to Eilat to party in the summers and relatives in Nazareth who say they can't even post on Gaza on social media fearing the IDF will come cause trouble, so I'm aware of the different perspectives. I'd suggest watching this to hear a different perspective to the one Israeli's are propagandised into and which may work against them in the long run:
  2. I didn't claim that, but that is what some very smart generals and military strategists have said - look up Scott Ritter and Douglas Macgregor. The IDF know so much that their border got breached by 'undeveloped' 'barbarian' 'animals' apparently.
  3. He said could be tunnels - yet that justifies bombing a refugee camp. Ridiculous. They don't know how their border got breached yet they know where Hamas is and want the world to believe their 'targeting'. When you've got western mass media pundits deciding this shit is too evil to stake their reputations on, you're losing. Even Wolf Blitzer ( who literally worked for AIPAC ) is pushing back against an IDF official about this and Piers Morgan. CNN's Wolf Blitzer: You knew that there were innocent civilians in that refugee camp, right? IDF spox: This is the tragedy of war. We told them to move south. Blitzer: So you decided to drop the bomb anyway. IDF spox: We’re doing everything we can to minimize civilian deaths. 'All these pundits are noticing the same thing, history may look very, very unkindly on those who supported this massacre. Not even the worst empire propagandists want that to be their lasting legacy.' Another week, another loss for Israels global reputation only to fuel yet another weekend ahead of even greater protests around the world. But Israelis think this is making them safer and that this is defence when really it is creating more hostility for them to be ever defensive against their whole lives.
  4. @Gennadiy1981 Who says Israel is winning? The IDF are made of mostly reservists who aren't professionally battle hardened soldiers. They've just made a intact city into rubble which only makes the terrain even harder to manoeuvre, paths will be laid as traps to go through and then encircled and ambushed by Hamas. These 'enemies' aren't that of decades ago, they have advanced as well and have capabilities that will make it very difficulty even for the US=Nato who are worn down by the Ukraine war which they have failed in also. The best case scenario is the IDF go in, start suffering casualties that the domestic population won't be okay with and the US come to end it and claim a 'strategic victory' to appease Israelis that something has been done about the Hamas attack when in reality it hasn't. Then bolster up the border defences and don't allow it to be breached ever again. But even US are hawkish on war so I doubt this is going to end well.
  5. The narrative managers are still struggling with the problem that when they announced that Palestinians had escaped from their concentration camp and killed a bunch of Israelis, an inconvenient number of people started asking “Wait, what were they doing in a concentration camp?”
  6. Propaganda uses decent human emotion to support indecent inhumane actions. That IDF video 'message to gazans' seemed to be propoganda geared more towards the West, to make their actions in Gaza more palatable. Global sentiment turns against Israel but the one populace they can't allow to turn is that of Americans - especially Jewish Americans as that would upend US support and writing a blank cheque for their interests. Also, the message was to Gazan's but they cut their internet and conducted it in English - make it make sense lol. Similar happened with Iraq, the baby incubator story was fabricated to justify the horror that Iraq went through. The marrying of religious end day prophecies with military industrial complex and the profit motive is going to wreck the region and have ripple affects globally. The worst part is - Israel will only lean more far right because demographically the ones having the most babies are the more orthodox settler types (4 babies on average compared to 2 for more secular Israelis). What makes up 10-15% of the population will eventually become 30%+ and have a huge sway on politics and policies.
  7. Israels current policy is that of a child frozen in an adults body. People are emoting rather than thinking in any clear way. If Israel wanted to 'win' this and secure a better peace and prosperity for themselves in the region they could stop the bombing and cutting of water electrics and food, call Hamas to the negotiating table and show the world who they claim Hamas to be which is barbaric and unreasonable ie unable to come to peace in negotiation - even better would be further to include some concessions to the Palestinians in any deals such as the Abraham accords. It would be by taking the moral high ground and not isolating itself from the world by what their doing now, including regressing of normalising with their neighbours especially Saudi Arabia. In fact, they are only uniting the two factions of Islam that are at odds with each other - Sunnis (Turkey) and Shia (Iran), they've done in one week what those sides didn't manage in 1400 years. If Israel thinks pushing Gazans into the Sinai dessert will resolve this their mistaken, their only pushing the problem further away by land but in the process stirring up more hate and an arc of revenge that will visit them in the future.
  8. ''I see people saying the US gets nothing out of its alliance with Israel and it's all one way, which is inaccurate. The interests of the US empire are massively advanced by having a nuclear-armed intelligence proxy in a strategically crucial resource-rich region constantly inflicting violence and chaos on non-US-aligned nations. Perhaps more importantly, Israel's existence serves as the ultimate argument against ever removing US troops from the middle east, which it doesn't want to do because of its interest in controlling the world's fossil fuel supply. As Joe Biden said, "If Israel didn't exist, we would have to invent it." People often point to Israel's aggressive lobbying efforts in Washington to argue that the alliance is not mutually beneficial, but lobbying is just one of the adhesives which holds an unofficial, unacknowledged empire together. You may be certain that if Washington didn't want Israel manipulating US politics in its own interests, it wouldn't be happening; the US government has plenty of laws at its disposal to shut that down if it wants. Israel has no qualms about pushing the US to give it the most it can get for the smallest possible return because it understands, quite correctly, that in the end Israel is still just an ally of convenience and the US will throw it under the bus the moment it's in the empire's interests to do so. Israel has an extensive history of aligning with hostile and unpredictable powers to advance its own interests, like the anti-semitic Christian Zionists and supporting the rise of Hamas. So the two power structures use each other for whatever they can get in exchange, and because of the way Israel was set up from the beginning their interests are aligned far more often than not.''
  9. ''We're being told that Israel needs to kill civilians by the thousands to eliminate Hamas, because Hamas must be destroyed to achieve a lasting peace. Every part of this is transparently false. Firstly the premise that Hamas must be eliminated to achieve peace is fallacious; peace can be achieved by eliminating the abuses and righting the wrongs which gave rise to Hamas in the first place. There's no rational reason to believe Hamas would continue to exist in its current iteration or keep waging violent resistance if the theft and injustice from 1948 onward were rolled back, refugees had the right to return, apartheid abuses were ended, and people were no longer kept in a giant concentration camp where they are deprived of basic human needs. Secondly the premise that you can bomb people into accepting an abusive status quo is self-evidently absurd. Even if Israel kills every single member of Hamas, there will be hundreds of thousands of survivors of this onslaught who see the depravity of Israel and refuse to accept it. You think all these orphaned boys and all these men who saw their loved ones ripped apart by military explosives are just going to be cool with the status quo from here on out? Of course not. And Israel knows this, which is why its preferred solution is to kick all survivors of this onslaught out of Gaza and into refugee camps in the Sinai desert. It knows that nothing it's doing will actually work and it refuses to make the reparations that will work, so its only other option is the elimination of Gazans one way or the other. Ethnic cleansing and mass displacement is not "peace" by any stretch of the imagination, but it might allow Israel to keep its abusive status quo intact. Those are Israel's only real options for sustainable stability: either right all the wrongs which led to this, or go the opposite direction and inflict far more wrongs to answer the Palestinian question once and for all. It's pretty clear watching all this that Israel has opted for the latter.''
  10. @Karmadhi The gulf have trillions worth of assets that could be seized by the West in retaliation. Also, the gulf aren't strong enough to take on Iran who they fear could turn hostile if they don't have security guarantees of the US. This is why Israel/Gaza is mostly Turkey and Irans fight to bear via Hezbollah and ancillary support from other Muslim countries via supplies, but never a direct boots on the ground confrontation.
  11. @something_else Very well said. ''Israeli policies created Hamas in the "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable" sense. If you stomp out every possible peaceful avenue of resistance, naturally you’re going to see the rise of factions which favor violent resistance. One of the most formative experiences in understanding this conflict happened in 2018 when Israeli soldiers fired on protesters with sniper rifles and live ammo. B’Tselem explicitly denounced this as unlawful. There’s nothing that could possibly make such a thing okay, and it was a very clear illustration of the way Israel has cut Palestinians off from all the normal pathways toward peaceful resolution. The Hamas attack will ultimately be a net negative for Palestinians. The reason pro Palestinians are perplexed at times and feel fuzzy to in good conscience “condemn Hamas” is probably because nobody can articulate a positive direction that Palestinians should be taking. The fact that all peaceful avenues of resistance have been cut off is not the fault of the Palestinians, and it’s not the fault of Hamas. It’s the fault of the Israeli government. Hamas is just what you get when you create an intolerably abusive apartheid state which keeps millions of people in a concentration camp whose inhabitants are cut off from basic human needs. Hamas isn’t the disease, it’s a symptom of the disease. The disease is an apartheid settler-colonialist project which cannot exist without endless violence, warfare and abuse.''
  12. Turkey and Iran are the only Muslim players in the region with some actual teeth to fight. The gulf countries can only act through diplomatic means and possibly financial / energy - even that is messy for them as they have trillions worth of assets managed by Western funds who are sympathetic to Israel, that money could be frozen as happened with Russian money. Israel is not de-escalating and Bibi is saying a hard no to ceasefire - Hezbollah and Iran and to a lesser extent Turkey have given their red lines which are being crossed and now will have to act in order to not lose credibility / save face.
  13. It wasn’t acceptable by any measure, morally or legally as it was against non-combatant civilians. No, but many from the Isreali government are conflating the two and calling for their extermination. The problem isn’t with Israel’s right to exist - it’s the form in which Israel currently exists being at the expense of the inhabitants of that land in which it needs to be shared with.
  14. Chris Hedges : Think about that. A people, imprisoned in the world’s largest concentration camp for sixteen years, denied food, water, fuel and medicine, lacking an army, air force, navy, mechanized units, artillery, command and control and missile batteries, is being butchered and starved by one of the most advanced militaries on the planet, and they are the Nazis/terrorists? There is an historical analogy here. But it is not one that Bennett, Netanyahu or any other Israeli leader wants to acknowledge. When those who are occupied refuse to submit, when they continue to resist, we drop all pretense of our “civilizing” mission and unleash, as in Gaza, an orgy of destruction. We become drunk on violence. This violence makes us insane. We kill with reckless ferocity. We become the beasts we accuse the oppressed of being. We expose the lie of our vaunted moral superiority. We expose the fundamental truth about Western civilization — we are the most ruthless and efficient killers on the planet. This alone is why we dominate the “wretched of the earth.” It has nothing to do with democracy or freedom or liberty. These are rights we never intend to grant to the oppressed. “Honor, justice, compassion and freedom are ideas that have no converts,” Joseph Conrad, who wrote “Heart of Darkness,” reminds us. “There are only people, without knowing, understanding or feelings, who intoxicate themselves with words, repeat words, shout them out, imagining they believe them without believing in anything else but profit, personal advantage and their own satisfaction.” Genocide lies at the core of Western imperialism. It is not unique to Israel. It is not unique to the Nazis. It is the building block of Western domination.
  15. @Lila9 Ariel Kallner, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, explained Israel’s goal behind the Gaza war. “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948,” he said. The same sentiment was conveyed by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, the man responsible for translating Israel’s declaration of war into an action plan: “We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly,” he said on October 9. Tutsis are cockroaches. We will kill you.” Arabs are like “drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” The first quote was a line repeated frequently by the Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, a Rwandan radio station, which is largely blamed for inciting hatred towards the Tutsi people. The second is by former Israeli army Chief-of-Staff Gen. Rafael Eitan in 1983, speaking at an Israeli parliament’s committee. Rwanda’s hate-filled radio station operated for only one year (1993-94), yet the outcome of its incitement resulted in one of the saddest and most tragic episodes in modern human history: the genocide of the Tutsis. Compare “Radio Genocide” to the massive Israeli-U.S.-Western propaganda, dehumanizing Palestinians almost with identical language to that used by Hutus’ media.
  16. When highly emotional peoples reasoning is disputed they often perceive this as invalidating their emotions. The deprivation of their “right to feel” because their opinion and its hasty conclusion is often founded upon an instinct or feeling rather than a deduction or investigation. @hundreth By law, people under occupation have the right to armed resistance which is denied to Palestinians but their are no rights for Israel to be doing things the way they are. Doesn't the Palestinian cause stand for much more than the isolated event of the Hamas attack? Of course they can't kill that many because it would cause the escalation of other fronts opening up and world wide condemnation and their biggest backer (US) pulling away. The slow, steady inhumane treatment of Palestinians to weaken them in every way through control is crippling in a way that isn't as evident and flagrant as the current operation.
  17. @Nivsch @PurpleTree @hundreth @Vrubel What would you guys define as terrorism? And to follow up from that, do you condemn that terrorism? The global standard definition of terrorist is: the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims. If you are logically consistent, can you not see that terrorism can be committed by a individual, organisation or a state - it is only a matter of degree and scale, and that Israel commits terrorist acts. That of course doesn't call for the extermination of the actor as a whole (Israel or a organisation) but rather an extermination of the conditions that would terrorise a person or a country into terrorist actions. You critique the behaviours and actions, not the being itself to be put out of existence.
  18. Yes exactly, it is easier to judge and discern a situation when emotions aren't as heavily involved. Emotion has its way of consuming people - there is not just a fog of war but the fog of emotion within a war that blinds you.
  19. Yes, Hamas - not Palestinians. But why is it that Hamas is a terrorist organisation but Israel isn't a terrorist state. Why isn't there logical consistency. What is your definition of terrorism and do you condemn it in any of its forms whether it be by an individual, organisation or at a state level?
  20. Israel does not follow the rules of engagement set out internationally. People can condemn and see the actions of Hamas as evil but its shocking how they can be complete Israel apologists, uncritical and hypocritical when it comes to Israels actions.
  21. Israelis have been heavily propagandised by their own government. Bibi and nationalist factions have instilled fear into the population by otherising a population and putting them into conditions which bring forth terrorist elements. Fear is a bad adviser, bias a bad interpreter.
  22. That’s the mentality that causes the issue. Unjust actions are made just through divine legitimacy - whether Islamist, Zionist or evangelical Christian. Gods chosen people are above criticism, and anyone who does criticise is an anti-demote.
  23. Do you condemn terrorism (going be the below googled definition) ? Definition: the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.
  24. Genocide of innocents is within the realm of justice? If you take Hamas to represent all Gazans, then by your logic it could be taken that extremist Israeli politicians represent everyday Israelis. Their is no law for genocide or ‘defence’ through genocide - but there is law for an occupied people to resist even with arms. All countries have laws, most have the rule of law, and few are outlaws - Israel is one such case.