Thanks for the standwithus link and copying of the flyer into your response, you must of broken a finger nail, which is what anti-free speech groups like standwithus wouldn't want to happen, they offer all the bullshit hyprocitcrical propaganda at zionist fingertips. For a liberal zionist I guess it isn't beyond you citing a right wing zionist propanganda group that writes Nakba in quotes (a blatant denial of Palestinian history) and who recruit their members to sit in on any person, group, organzation that's critical of israel in any way. At one of Makdisi's last talks, and they try to do with this on all campuses, they distributed a list of questions:
Makdisi's twitter entry: Standwithus, the crudest US Zionist group, has distributed a list of questions they want their hooligans to ask me at a talk next week.
And have also been proven to be fabricators by another jewish group:
http://mondoweiss.net/2011/12/right-win ... srael.html Their laughable twitter entries go something like Are settlements an obstacles to peace? and have made staments oh their website like "there is no humanatarian crisis in Gaza."
In their flyer, which I am sure was ciruculated among the most discerning of groups, tremendously editorializes, provides mostly idf sources and a nytimes source, which I searched for in the archives section given the date and keywords, and I came up with nothing, and that is more than enough attention i can give this delusional comic group that criticizes israeli "moderates" like you claim to be.
On the lancet article, first of all, I question the "viewpoint," (the name of this section of lancet) of the idf doctor, Sami Viskin, who from the opening paragraph seems too proud of his post in the occupying army, as someone stated in a letter to the lancet:
"Viskin's article is in stark contrast to your April 26 Editorial (p 1399),4 which addresses the legal and humanitarian responsibilities of occupying powers, in particular in Iraq. The same rules hold for the Israeli occupying forces in the West Bank and Gaza; collective punishment is expressly prohibited. Yet how else can the mass destruction of homes in the West Bank and Gaza by the Israeli occupation forces be explained?2 How else can the destruction of 17·5 km2 of arable land in Gaza be accounted for?... I believe Viskin is naive to think that his integrity as a cardiologist remains untarnished when he wears his military uniform. Perhaps he should spend less time defending the politically self-righteous and more time caring for the poor, oppressed, and dispossessed."
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lance ... 40-6736(03)13828-7/fulltext
After he pats himself on the back for helping a Palestinian woman, he goes onto say that he had countless encounters with Palestinian ambulances, BUT then also claims that these abmulances have been "repeatedly" used to transport combatants and weapons. Wouldn't Dr.idf have come across a combatant or weapon himself on one of these encounters if they "repeatedly" have been used to transfer militants and weapons?
From Viskin in his viewpoint in the lancet:
I would later read in disbelief what the press classified as the indiscriminate firing at Palestinian ambulances by Israeli soldiers.That is not what I saw. The guidelines of the IDF are straightforward: Palestinian ambulances must be allowed freedom of passage to zones of conflict unless there is evidence that they are being used to transport military equipment. These guidelines are orders from the General Command of the IDF (as testified by the Command Secretary in an official response to an inquiry by the Israel Medical Association).3 In fact, these are the same orders I heard when working in the field.Unfortunately, Palestinian ambulances were repeatedly used to transport combatants and weapons, prompting the IDF to send an official protest to the International RedCross on May 2, 2002.4 The communication included reports of terrorists who were disguised as being wounded and transported in ambulances of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (the local form of the International RedCross) in attempts to evade the IDF. Also, flagrant abuse of medical accreditation by Palestinian terrorists was reported on January 27, 2002, after a terrorist bombing indowntown Jerusalem. Both the female suicide terrorist (Wafa Idris), and the attack coordinators (Mohammed Hababa and Munzar Noor) worked for the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.
No, he has to reference the idf forces who before this March "discovery" have been admonished by human rights organizations to stop attacking amublances, shortly before March 27 2002, when the vest was "discovered"
Human Rights Watch, March 9, 2002:
"Human Rights Watch today called on the Israeli government to instruct soldiers to immediately refrain from attacking medical personnel in the West Bank and Gaza. During the past week, at least three ambulances have been fired upon, three ambulance staff have died, and nine other medical personnel have been injured.
http://www.hrw.org/news/2002/03/08/isra ... -personnel Btselem stated that before March 27, that it has become almost routine for idf to shoot at ambulances:
Firing at Ambulances and Medical Staff
Since the beginning of the al-Aqsa intifada, B’Tselem has documented cases in which IDF soldiers fired at ambulances and medical staff on their way to evacuate the wounded.[1] Since 28 February 2002, there has been a significant increase in the number of such cases, and they have become almost routine. The gunfire has killed and wounded medical team members, and damaged ambulances. The gunfire has also made it impossible for the medical teams to evacuate the wounded to hospital, and some of the injured have bled to death.
The IDF also fires at ambulances and medical teams where passage of the ambulances has been coordinated with IDF officials, For example, Dr. Waal Qadan, director of the red Crescent Society in the Occupied territories, informed B’Tselem that, during the IDF’s incursion into Ramallah, agreement was reached with the army that Red Crescent ambulances would be allowed to move about when accompanied by a Red Cross vehicle. Despite this, on 12 March 2002, at about 6:30 P.M., IDF soldiers fired at a Red Cross vehicle that was accompanying an ambulance, striking it twice. As a result, the medical teams halted their work until the following afternoon, when the movement of ambulances was once again coordinated with the army. During that time, the Red Crescent received forty-two calls to evacuate wounded to which they could not respond.
http://www.btselem.org/download/200203_ ... nt_eng.doc A mere coincidence that the idf finds a vest just as human right organizations begin to take notice and condemn the idf for attacking and targeting amulances? I have searched for info on the International Red Cross web site and for any independent source that there were two International Red Cross members at the this finding as the captions state.
Also how could Viskin pass on Wafa Idris working for the Red Crescent, how in the world does that justify firing ambulances and sick people? I am missing the connection, she didn't pose as a Red Crescent worker, she wasn't driving an ambulance at the time, it was her occupation. Trying to make a twisted connection to justify killing innocent people is just that, twisted.
As for the guidelines which idf ignore, seriously violate and that go unpunished are there to fill up space in this article, seem to be there for Viskin to further his self congratulation, that he is working with a truly democratic occupying force who would NEVER target ambulances. The joke is exactly on who? Because some of the accounts of ambulances being fired upon and delayed and sick patients being denied medical services, and who die at checkpoints are sickening and would shake any with a conscience.
What you have in the lancet article is a doctor from the occupying force justifying the collective punishment on ambulances. There is no justifciation for killing innocent people. The opening paragraph of this Haaretz article:
"Rules of Engagement: Open fire also upon rescue," was handwritten in Hebrew on a sheet of paper found in one of the Palestinian homes the Israel Defense Forces took over during Operation Cast Lead. A reservist officer who did not take part in the Gaza offensive believes that the note is part of orders a low-level commander wrote before giving his soldiers their daily briefing. "
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/fe ... s-1.272628What you are proclaiming or trying to prove that the idf/the occupying forces are accroding to "Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, among others, 'is the most moral army in the world' This description of Israeli behavior is yet another myth, another element in what Maron Benvenisti, the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, calls Israel's sacred narrative.... Indeed, terrorism was one of the key tactics that the Zionists used when they were in a similiarly weak position and trying to obtain their own state. It was Jewish terrorists from the infamous Irgun, a militant Zionist group, who in late 1937 introduced into Palestine the now-familiar practice of placing bombs in buses and large crowds. Benny Morris speculates "the Arabs may well have learned the value of terrorist bombings from the Jews." Between 1944 and 1947, several Zionist organizations used terrorist attacks to drive the British from Palestine and took the lives of many innocent civilians along the way. Israeli terrorists also murdered the U.N. mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948 because they opposed his proposal to internationalize Jerusalem. The perpetrators of these acts were not isolated extremists: the leaders of the murder plot were eventually granted amnesty by the Israeli government and one of them was later elected to the Knesset. Another terrorist leader, who approved of Bernadotte's murder but was not tried, was future Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. He openly argued that "neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat." Rather, terrorism had "a great part to play...in our war against the occupier (Britain)." Nor did Shamir express regrets about his terrorist past, telling an interviewer in 1998 that "had I not acted as I did, it is doubtful that we would have been able to create an independent Jewish state of our own."Of course, Menachem Begin, who headed the Irgun and later became prime minister, was one of the most prominent Jewish terrorists in the years before Israeli independence. When speaking of Begin, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol often referred to him simply as "the terrorist." p. 102 The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
If you want to use the old testament as a real estate document, then why not using it to explain your claimed misuse of ambulances as you reap what you sow: they that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same. (Job 4:8)
yosi wrote:I'm not requesting that you turn a blind eye towards anything. I'm asking that if you want to criticize Jews that you do so without comparing us to the people that butchered our parents and grandparents in their millions. I'd think that for any reasonably empathetic person it would be plainly obvious why such a comparison is wildly offensive.
This isn't about my feelings getting hurt. I can deal with hurt feelings. This is about you. How you express yourself. How you treat the people you interact with. I'm asking you to conduct yourself in a way that is respectful of others. I'm not telling you not to express your opinions, I'm just asking you not to be a dick when you do so.
I will repeat that I am not the first to compare israel to nazis, again Norman Finkelstien, whose parents survived two of the worst concentration camps has pointed out the parallels, his article on Jewish Nazis,
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/jewish ... ork-again/, Finkelstein has indeed studied the Holocaust in depth, he had his very own first hand account from his parents on the Holocaust, I ask why you discount his legitmate standing on the subject, he wrote his Princeton doctoral dissertation on the subject of Israel Paletine, do you think you know something he doesn't or felt something he hasn't when he calls Israel nazis? One of the main points that you are sadly missing when he makes this comparison is... "The Nazi holocaust, however horrific and even if forever a part of Germany’s present, is–except for the handful of survivors–fundamentally a historical question. The persecution of the Palestinians is, by contrast, an on-going horror, and it is, after all, the crimes of the Third Reich that are used to justify this persecution. In the first instance, moral action by Germans is no longer possible; in the second, it plainly is." Finkelstein
http://www.counterpunch.org/2002/11/25/ ... n-germany/ You come on here defending murderous people who want to justify taking another people's land and lives, humiliating them and making their lives a living hell on a daily basis, hindering their movement, lining them up at checkpoints and with a wave of the hand deciding on the fate of millions of people. What gives you the right to say that they there aren't parallels, when you haven't lived it, or refuse to see the great injustification that this racist apartheid state is committing. Your beliefs alone fall in line with a TRANSFER of a people out of their homeland, how else would the two state solution that you support come to be? As you noted that the Palestinians are growing in number, and perhaps soon will outnumber the jewish population, so a state for just for the jews plainly means TRANSFER, and as Jabotinksy, again, states that "Hitler as odious as he was to us....gave it a good name in the world." How in the world can a Jew refer to Hitler on transfer but its off limits to the people that are a witness to and victim to the horrendous acts of ethnic cleansing? But you want to claim that I am the dick? That's fine, given your views, a compliment from you would make me question my moral integrity, so I think I am doing okay. Here's a news flash, creating a jewish homeland is not the answer to anti-semitism, saying Yes, that we are a foreign body that doesn't belong in Germany or Russia, or wherever these jewish immigrants were from, the true land of their forefathers, (read Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People) and we need to be separate from a "master" race and have a homeland of our own based on these anti-semitic views that we don't belong, SOLVES NOTHING.
by yosi » Mon Apr 23, 2012 1:24 pm 
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