CNN is reporting that Israeli ground troops are entering Gaza, having prepared the way with artillery fire and bombing mosques.
Given that all of the rocket fire has been coming from the South end of Gaza, does anyone else think it’s strange that the Israelis are entering from the North. If you are trying to stop the rocket attacks, why not go after the locations the rockets are coming from? So far the only people who don’t seem to be targeted are those firing rockets.
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16 comments
They don’t want to go after the folks shooting at them? Uh..huh. Anyone in the corporate media actually noticing that?
Half of the dead, about 200, are Gaza policemen and cadets.
As near as I can tell, it may be because the roads are better. The two main roads are in the North, as is the majority of the civilian population.
It looks like a terror campaign, plain and simple.
That’d be like the U.S. finishing the job in Afghanistan before going into Iraq.
This something that was exposed in the Hezbollah War, Israeli ground intel sucks. They have satellite data, drones, overflights, and agents on the ground, and their intel is garbage.
Their targeting looks like it came from a tourist map, not a military planning operation. This is as screwed up as Grenada or Somalia.
An invasion was inevitable the moment Israel declared they were going to stop the rocket attacks. Once again, as in Lebanon, they declared they were going to bomb until the rocket attacks stopped. Once again, as in Lebanon, they found out that bombing never wins a war — it takes boots on the ground to win a war.
The difference between Lebanon and Gaza is that Hamas is nowhere near as well armed as Hezbollah was, and doesn’t have the terrain and fortifications that neutralized Israel’s armor in Lebanon. On the other hand, if they just trot on in and do nothing to take out the people actually shooting the rockets, it’ll be just a ground equivalent of the air campaign — much fuss and fury for no result.
Oh, why is Israel’s intelligence so friggin’ inept nowdays? Mostly it’s because almost no Jewish Israelis (the only ones allowed into Israel’s military intelligence) speak Arabic anymore. Back in the day, Israel could rely on the Arab Jews, those that had fled the Arab countries and knew the cultures and the language. Today those old folks have pretty much died out and their children’s children have no connection to Arabic language and culture. The stupidity of Arabic not being a required / official language of Israel, when they’re surrounded by Arabic-speakers, also comes into play… the religious right in Israel goes flying into a fury whenever anybody suggests that Arabic be an official language of Israel. Arabic should be a required language in Israeli schools much like English is in Chinese schools, but Israel’s religious right just proclaims “Israel is a Jewish state and speaks Hebrew, period” and intimidates everybody into not making it so. It’s as if there were a few million English speakers in the world surrounded by Spanish speakers and we refused to teach Spanish in the schools… insanity. Utter insanity. Sigh.
– Badtux the Geoopolitics Penguin
They did it before, and it didn’t work, so they’ll do it again, in hopes they can win an election by being tough. They might succeed in discrediting any Palestinian who would like to make peace and leaving all of the power to the crazies. Gaza has lost all of its normal public service components and the cops that kept a lid on, so the situation will be objectively worse.
For the six months of the Hamas cease fire, no Israelis died. The Israelis did absolutely nothing in return, so Hamas said screw it and now Israelis are dying. On a pragmatic level the Israelis have made things much worse for their own people, but they pretend they are brave and resolute.
The Israelis need to work through their national mental illness about the actions of the Jews in Europe during World War II and rejoin the real world.
The problem is that their current national mental illness is objectively different from their prior national mental illness that originated with what happened to Jews in Europe during WWII. There is no existential threat to Israel today, unlike in, say, 1967. Of the nations in the region that might potentially threaten Israel, only Egypt has a military that has any degree of capability that might be a threat to Israel, and Egypt is quite happy to sit on the sidelines and accept their billions of dollars of U.S. bribes to stay out of it.
So, not having any existential threats, their national politic seems intent upon creating ones out of thin air, much as George W. Bush invented the infamous Iraqi WMD as an existential threat to America. Talk about going psychotic… with our money. Sigh.
– Badtux the Psychosis-knowin’ Penguin
It’s the same problem, only now there is no way of hiding it. The justification ended with the 1948 war. The Israelis attacked Egypt in 1956, and then the rest of the neighborhood in 1967. The Yom Kippur War was a reaction to 1967 and the occupation of territory, as have been the rocket attacks. The Israelis brought it on themselves since the original war of creation.
They keep claiming “preemption” is the only way to survive, when it’s the only way they have ever reacted to any perceived slight or incident. They are a nation of paranoids who believe that negotiations can only lead to the gas chamber. The US needs to stop enabling their rages.
I found this in my Internet wanderings for anyone interested.
<a href=”//www.flickr.com/photos/55428930@N00/2303482767/” title=”gaza_black_ribbon” rel=”nofollow”><img src=”//farm3.static.flickr.com/2017/2303482767_cbc28e16ba_m.jpg” width=”129″ height=”192″ alt=”gaza_black_ribbon” /></a>
Hmmm. “Israel-Nazi”… How apropos. 🙂
Errrm. Bryan… That shouldn’t have rendered between ‘code’ tags! Dis I mess up again, or is there any way of fixing that? 😉
Ta! 😀
Ehhhh… It seems ‘flickr’ have decided to remove the ribbon as offensive. I wonder who runs flickr then? 😉 LOL
Here’s the ribbon (before flickr removed it)
*sigh* I’m not having a good day!! That comment #9 had a flikr error (missing image error) when I posted that comment (which wasn’t supposed to render anyway as I used the ‘code’ tags). Then I checked the Image catalog for the guy that posted the ribbon on flickr, and it had been removed. Now it’s back? Someone is messing with me! Hmmph.
Delete any of the above as you think appropriate. Don’t want to clutter the thread.
Ok, I finally figured out how to do it in comments: Use the & codes for “less than” and “greater than” which displays properly, but isn’t recognized as HTML. If the formatter see HTML it executes it, even within CODE. PITA
If you copy and paste it will work, but in a comment form it will only display.
I removed the code tags to see what was going on, and it displayed.
It sounds like someone challenged the post, and then it was cleared by a moderator.
Thanks Bryan. Sorry to be a problem. 🙂
Blogs are supposed to be easy and fun! Isn’t that how they are billed? 😉 LOL
I’ve actually just begun playing with WordPress v2.7 for this site I’m developing. It doesn’t play very nice with Joomla! for a start! I can see I’ll have my work cut out for me. 😉
So… when does the *fun* bit start? Just wonderin… LOL
The PhP and HTML are in constant conflict if you have ever hand-coded. Of course, storing the text in mySQL adds to the fun. It’s not a problem, and it is something I need to understand if I’m going to post certain things. At some point I’m going to have to fight with CSS over tables, because the standard definition is not to my liking.
It’s alright if the people commenting want to stay with plain text, but I don’t know too many people who do.