Open thread: Punch On 1/6/2010

Swinging Voter & Former snag says:

11:36am | 01/06/10

@ Eric, Nailed it & Ditto for the Allegedly Anti DV Industry.

Zeta says:

09:35am | 01/06/10

Well if you believed the Daily Telegraph website - the only thing Israel is doing today is switching codes.

But you can’t pick sides here. Militants supporting pro-Palestinian causes kill people too. One side is no worse than the other. If Hamas had the resources of the IDF at their disposal - do you think they’d be using peace-loving activists to ferry ‘aid’ onto the Gaza Strip? No, they’d be shooting back.

Both sides continue to hamper the peace process. Both sides use explosives to assassinate each other’s leaders. Both sides kidnap and murder the other side’s soldiers. And both sides lie through their teeth about it while maintaining facades of respectability - for Israel, it’s respectability in the West, for Hamas, it’s the respect of the MEU.

For my money, Israel creeps ahead only slightly in the wartime ethics stakes. For the simple reason that while Israel has never hesitated to shoot first and ask questions later - they at least try to keep their own civilians safe. The Palestinians use them as human shields, as brainwashed suicide bombers, and as we’ve seen here - they’ll even use young, impressionable foreign aid workers if they think they can get political capital out of it.

Historian says:

12:40pm | 01/06/10

Israel is doing to the Palestinian’s in Gaza what the Nazi did to Polish Jews and Romani people in the Warsaw Ghetto. Perfectly understandable actions on the part of Israel but what is the US excuse?

Paul Horn says:

12:49pm | 01/06/10

Or sending tens of thouands of Qassam rockets indiscriminately into Israeli towns and cities in direct defiance of every ceasefire agreement ever made between the Israelis and the Palestinian authorities!! 

Or Hamas leaders deliberately sheltering with women and children in the belief that they will be safe because the Israelis will refuse to bomb such innocents.

Just imagine if the Indonesians decided to lob a couple of thousand rockets into the centre of Darwin a year because they did’nt agree with whites inhabiting the country? Do you think we would be justified in sending a couple of F1-11’s on a bombing mission straight into the heart of Jakarta? Bet your bloody life we would and any screaming inner city dweller inhabiting the relative safety of Melbourne or Sydney would be taken to account quick smart. 

These are terrorists whose sole purpose is to wipe Israel from the face of the Earth. Your filthy stinking trendy lefty hypocrisy Chong is a blight to reason and truthfulness. There is only one criminal outfit here Chong and it ain’t the Israelis!

Recant your lies!

T.Chong says:

02:55pm | 01/06/10

See you full of hate, still, Paul.
Yes Paul, very scared of you and yur anger. Fascist.

Zeta says:

12:10pm | 01/06/10

@ stephen - actually Israel would take issue with your assumption that the 2 highest priorities are the security of Israeli citizens and a ‘final arrangement with Palestine’, that is, if you mean a ‘lasting peace’ with Palestine.

Israel has, for better or worse, only one priority that takes precedence over all others - the creation of a perpetual Israeli State. If the Earth is a nuclear wasteland, and just one healthy Israeli is left standing on Mount Sinai with an Uzi - Israel wins. It’s the same logic the US applied during the Cold War. Only Israel’s war with the Middle Eastern Union is anything but cold. And only Israel has the bomb. Or at least two of them. That we know about.

As for the ‘peace barges’ being harmless, they’re not, and you’re using the weasel words coined by Hamas’ own, highly paid, Western based spin doctors. There is an embargo on shipping goods of any kind into Gaza, these peace barges broke the embargo. During the Food-For-Oil regime the United States would have done the same thing to an unlicenced ship bringing humanitarian aid to Iraq. We do a similar thing here in Australia to people smugglers. Hey, maybe they should start calling themselves ‘peace barges’ and get some outcry going.

Israel is on its own. They are locked in on all sides by hostile regimes, lead by criminals and extremists. We might pay them lip service, neo-conservatives might fall over themselves for them, but where were they during the Yom Kippur war? Where was Israel’s ‘best friend and ally’ the United States during the last three intifadahs? The American response to Islamic aggression against Israel has been basically “sorry dude, you can come crash and the ranch if things get to hot and you need to ‘talk’”.

Israel knows they’re on their own in this, which is why thier actions seem extreme. But they’re backed into a corner. Only one country is walking away from the shitfight that is the Middle East. They’re all bastards. They all kill civilians. But for the stability of the West - I hope Israel wipes the rest of them off the map. Because if the Middle Eastern states didn’t have Israel to worry about… maybe they’d start worrying about everyone else.

stephen says:

12:20pm | 02/06/10

Hamas has, to my knowledge, never used the words ‘peace barges’.
And Zeta, you are better when you’re funny, or are you just being that ?

Swinging Voter & Former snag says:

01:55pm | 01/06/10

Ah Penbo, its an open thread & comments here, have proven to be, less censored, more likely to be published & enjoyed by punchers, less likely to be from either the “raving right” or the “loony, Left”.

BTS says:

02:51pm | 01/06/10

You mean you couldn’t see the obvious connnection?

Gene Gene is cleary Mossad.

Notorious says:

02:53pm | 01/06/10

@ David Penberthy

Probably in much the same way that nearly every post turns into completely unrelated fierce Rudd/ALP bashing, or fierce Abbott/LP bashing. People with the most diametrically opposed and rigid opinions and shrillest voices need to have opinions heard somewhere…

As for me. I’m happy to be fed a steady diet of Gene Gene the Dancing Machine, other videos on open thread and the quality pieces you produce (sans rabid opinioning).

T.Chong says:

03:00pm | 01/06/10

Simple Dave,  I , like some ,were pretty shocked at what happened with the flotilla.
This was the only open forum, as at the ABC ,The Drum is very heavily biased on most topics.
The Punch wins by being a center of freer speech.