Via the Muqata.
Palestinians vs Israelis in one image
Posts Tagged ‘reality’
He expresses it better than me
Posted: January 6, 2009 by datechguy in opinion/news, warTags: history, Israel, reality
I’ve been wrestling with a post I made yesterday through several replies and updates. I think Jeff Goldberg (via Glenn) in the Atlantic expressed what I’ve been thinking much better than me:
Okay, yesterday I was depressed. Today, I’m just pissed off. It’s absolutely astonishing to me how interested the world is in Israel’s failings. This is the source of a bitter but hilarious observation I once heard a Kurdish leader make: He was complaining to me that his people were cursed, and I asked him what he meant: Cursed by geography, cursed by their proximity to Kurd-hating Arabs, what? He said the Kurds were cursed because they didn’t have Jewish enemies. Only with Jewish enemies would the world pay attention to their plight.
…
we’ve all seen endless pictures of dead Palestinian children now. It’s a terrible, ghastly, horrible thing, the deaths of children, and for the parents it doesn’t matter if they were killed by accident or by mistake. But ask yourselves this: Why are these pictures so omnipresent? I’ll tell you why, again from firsthand, and repeated, experience: Hamas (and the Aksa Brigades, and Islamic Jihad, the whole bunch) prevents the burial, or even preparation of the bodies for burial, until the bodies are used as props in the Palestinian Passion Play. Once, in Khan Younis, I actually saw gunmen unwrap a shrouded body, carry it a hundred yards and position it atop a pile of rubble — and then wait a half-hour until photographers showed. It was one of the more horrible things I’ve seen in my life. And it’s typical of Hamas. If reporters would probe deeper, they’d learn the awful truth of Hamas. But Palestinian moral failings are not of great interest to many people.
The question is why are Palestinian moral failings not of great interest to people, why are the Kurds cursed to not have Jewish foes?
Can someone on the left explain this to me? I really need an answer to this that leads me to different conclusions.
This one is for my friends at the open house
Posted: January 5, 2009 by datechguy in personal, warTags: Israel, reality
At my open house I mentioned the non-shrapnel missiles that Israel is using to chase civilians before blasts. A pair of liberal friends of mine looked at me like I had two heads or was a naive idiot so this post is for them. The process is known as “Knocking on the roof” here is a post on the subject:
5:05 PM Just to give people an idea of how the Israeli Air Force works, they use a method called “Knocking On The Roof”. There are several steps…
1. The AF calls the house they’re about to hit that they are about to bomb it.
2. The residents send all the women and children to the roof of the building with the understanding that the AF won’t strike civilians.
3. The AF has developed a small missile that creates a small non-lethal explosion without shrapnel to scare off all the civilians.
4. When they have left the area the building is hit with the big guns.
The base post is from this post at The Muqata which along with Israellycool has been liveblogging the war. (I was sure I had read it at Israellycool but was mistaken).
This post at Mere Rethoric also mentions it but not by name:
The IDF has made frequent use of what is known as “knocking on the roof”: Militants are warned by phone when a residential building used to store arms will be bombed, and told to vacate the premised together with their neighbors. The weapons caches are hit only after the residents leave. Hamas has tried placing civilians on the roofs of such buildings when the phone call warning comes in. In these cases, the IDF fired antitank missiles near the building, and in a few cases the residents left
His bottom line is the war’s bottom line:
Israel warns the Palestinian civilians whom Hamas has endangered. Hamas uses those warnings to endanger their civilians even more dramatically. Israel gets blamed for Palestinian civilian casualties. Makes perfect sense.
The irony is both on offense and defense our Palestinian friends try to maximize civilian deaths, both Israeli and their own. This is just plain a different culture.
Bloggers doing the work the MSN used to be paid for
Posted: January 5, 2009 by datechguy in opinion/newsTags: reality
Michelle Malkin who like Don Suber was a reporter before the days of blogs has a rather comprehensive list of original reporting done by bloggers over the last year:
Well, over the weekend, a few bloggers on both the left and right perpetuated an ill-informed and self-serving myth that demands debunking. The myth is that conservative bloggers don’t do reporting.
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For various reasons, the incredible amount of investigative online reporting published on conservative blogs in just the last year alone has gone largely uncredited. Let’s fix that here and now.
The list is MUCH too long to quote here, just go and read the whole thing. via Hotair which was also a creation of Michelle Malkin.
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