Conflict leaves Gaza's agriculture in ruins

For some reason he forgot to post it on here....sent to my inbox .

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Yo, Highr0ller!

kewldd has replied to your comment on Current.com:

kewldd said:

". . . You declare, my friend, that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely 'anti-Zionist.' And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God's green earth: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews--this is God's own truth. "Antisemitism, the hatred of the Jewish people, has been and remains a blot on the soul of mankind. In this we are in full agreement. So know also this: anti-Zionist is inherently antisemitic, and ever will be so. "Why is this? You know that Zionism is nothing less than the dream and ideal of the Jewish people returning to live in their own land. The Jewish people, the Scriptures tell us, once enjoyed a flourishing Commonwealth in the Holy Land. From this they were expelled by the Roman tyrant, the same Romans who cruelly murdered Our Lord. Driven from their homeland, their nation in ashes, forced to wander the globe, the Jewish people time and again suffered the lash of whichever tyrant happened to rule over them. "The Negro people, my friend, know what it is to suffer the torment of tyranny under rulers not of our choosing. Our brothers in Africa have begged, pleaded, requested--DEMANDED the recognition and realization of our inborn right to live in peace under our own sovereignty in our own country. "How easy it should be, for anyone who holds dear this inalienable right of all mankind, to understand and support the right of the Jewish People to live in their ancient Land of Israel. All men of good will exult in the fulfilment of God's promise, that his People should return in joy to rebuild their plundered land. This is Zionism, nothing more, nothing less. "And what is anti-Zionist? It is the denial to the Jewish people of a fundamental right that we justly claim for the people of Africa and freely accord all other nations of the Globe. It is discrimination against Jews, my friend, because they are Jews. In short, it is antisemitism. "The antisemite rejoices at any opportunity to vent his malice. The times have made it unpopular, in the West, to proclaim openly a hatred of the Jews. This being the case, the antisemite must constantly seek new forms and forums for his poison. How he must revel in the new masquerade! He does not hate the Jews, he is just 'anti-Zionist'! "My friend, I do not accuse you of deliberate antisemitism. I know you feel, as I do, a deep love of truth and justice and a revulsion for racism, prejudice, and discrimination. But I know you have been misled--as others have been--into thinking you can be 'anti-Zionist' and yet remain true to these heartfelt principles that you and I share. Let my words echo in the depths of your soul: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews--make no mistake about it." From M.L. King Jr., "Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend," Saturday Review_XLVII (Aug. 1967), p. 76. Reprinted in M.L. King Jr., "This I Believe: Selections from the Writings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr."

Check out the conversation or leave a reply here: http://current.com/items/89775801/conflict_leaves_gaza_s_agriculture_in_ruins.ht...

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." ~Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Why We Can't Wait, 1963

It's rarely wise to start fights with people that can kick your ass. Logic would dictate playing the hand you're dealt, which in the case of Palestine, is not a military one.

Sure, the entire scenario is wrong, but why give Israel and excuse to use the absurd arsenal America supplied them with?

Nonetheless, what Israel is doing is wrong, they are destroyers, and God does not destroy things, so their entire Biblical (are you serious?) claim to anything is being severly undermined by their behavior.

When the "persecuted" become the persecutors, they are no longer the victims. What a miserable state of the human condition.

Highroller i saw your comment on technology diffrence and thats a horrible point to make. So the deaths of the Israelies should go unchecked because they were only killed by crude weapons? If you try to stab me with a knife i sure as hell am gonna use my gun to stop you

http://www.nkusa.org/

Check this site out

Wow. Looks like you've got it all figured out, Derek.

This post was about the destruction of agriculture that effects thousands of innocent people and their ability to live. How do you feel about that? And yes, I know the Israeli government spends a lot of US money on their military and I'm tired of supporting it. So to keep down civilian deaths you kill? How logical. How like the God you claim to love. Face it, both sides hate, and that is why nothing is ever accomplished. And personally, whoever stated Israel should be nuked was wrong as well. However, the fact that you cannot admit that what was done to the agriculture of this area which only inflames the situation by bringing on a humanitarian crisis and was disproportionate speaks volumes about why this will be neverending.

Most of the people who have commented on this have no clue about what really goes on here in Israel. Do any of you live here? Do you know what it feels like when your family members are murdered by a Hamas rocket? You have no clue! For 8 years, ever since the Palestinian people elected their Hamas leaders, Israel has delt with rocket attack after rocket attack. I dont know of any other country in the world that would put up with that type of terrorism for that long without a military solution. Somebody, PLEASE name me one other country that has been that patient! Oh and do any of you have proof that this video and those pictures were actually taken here in Israel? Prove it...please. If Hamas actually cared about it's people, they would spend there money on the people, not on half-ass home made rockets. Israel spends a lot of that money from the U.S. on developing new technology for it's miltary in the hopes of being able to have less civilian deaths. Get your facts straight. I live here in Israel and work with a number of Muslim Arabs who really cant stand Hamas!!! Why? Because they understand the damage that has been done to their people by those cowards. And for the "Just Nuke Israel" comment...get a life! Your no better than the "Genocide" you accuse us of.

The first thing we can all do and pass it on. DEMAND our money, yes 7 million a DAY goes to Israel and has for years.

First of all, we can't afford it. And as citizens we are theoretically sponsoring war.

That amount is just slightly excessive as well.

www.whitehouse.gov

GENOCIDE. GENOCIDE GENOCIDE

The Independent's Bruce Anderson argues that if the hawks have their way, Israel will not survive the century. As long as the state of Israel occupies the West Bank, Palestine will be the Arab world's sore tooth. Robert Fisk says that the Israeli army is using the old tactic of keeping press and reporters out of Gaza. Israel could not operate behind cosed doors forever with the result is that Palestinian voices are now dominating the airwaves. Israel behaved as the fox in the henhouse and its propaganda machine is creaking to a halt as iot gets harder and harder to deny the ETHNIC CLEANSING and WAR CRIMES.
Niall Ferguson tells us that three factors explain the timing and the location of the extreme violence of the twentieth century: ethnic disintegration, economic volatility, and empires in decline. Israel should heed the lessons of its predecessors. Empire cannot escape the laws of history. One of the most salient of these laws is that empires generate opposition to their rule, ranging from strategic realignment among states to terrorism within them. Even the people of Israel will one day have to wake up and realise it is surrounded and it can't hold back the tide of Arab anger forever with the brutality it applies consistently.

Yes, and this isn't even about Hamas to me. We are talking about CHILDREN here. Children and people who now are starving and thristing because their crops are gone due to US support. Now, I don't know if Hamas would deign to do the same to Israel's crops and farms if they had the same firepower, perhaps they would and I would decry that as a human rights abuse as well. But they don't have the same firepower. This isn't a fair fight, and it shouldn't be a fight at all. But lets face it, "ceasefires" are bogus without any action after they are instituted to change things for the better.

I really think at this point through all of the years of hate and abuses that the ony way to be fair is to apportion the punishment to fit the crime, and that has not happened as of yet in the international community. Israel should be sanctioned for their blatant crimes meant to starve and collectively punish an entire people, and Hamas then must be held responsible for not properly working to maintain peace and safety in their region.The fact that the Israeli government manages to be absolved of anything they do is a main reason why these firings continue as well. Not that they are right, but what can we expect when we see nothing else of real substance happening? You take away an entire peoples' ability to sustain themselves, and not expect them to hate you? Just look at the Israelis who watched this from a hilltop as if on a picnic. Imagine their hate if this was done to them.

It is unbelievable how so many cannot see that.

It makes no sense what Israel has done to their land and food supply. The only sense it does make is to eradicate the Palestinians. Did anyone see the writing on the walls the IDF left the Gaza people? very sick...

word!

In the American civil war the Union soldeiers stole all the food of the Cajuns in SW Louisiana. The vast majority of them did not have slaves but were just yeomen farmers.
They never forgot that all their food was stolen and they starved. I recall uncles and grandfathers saying Damn damn Yankees. Not because they supported slavery but because their own fathers told them that they starved because the Yankees stole their pigs, chickens, horses nd all food. So its easy to make enemies by treating peasants like dirt.

This is the evil. Isreal destroying people's olive groves and means of survival. That is whay I am not Israel right or wrong. I love Israel and even have Jewish relatives and some Jewish blood, but I want things done fairly

Unfortunate some only have hate in their hearts and can do nothing but see one side in this. It is the main reason why peace will never come.

And also, no one in this thread has stated that one side in this has a moral high ground so let me reiterate what I typed originally: collective punishment and denying people food and water regardless of WHO does it is a human rights abuse. Would actually be refreshing to have a conversation on the human aspect of this. Sad that there are those on both sides who would want nothing less than to see all of those on the other side dead to the point of destroying farms and livestock and all that sustains them. But then it appears to be the MO of our own military as they bulldozed Iraqi farms as well.

"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."-
Isaac Asimov

Yeah, that goes for both sides.

jan hate kills the world , It kills happiness, It kills spirits . It kills children , It kills women and men and grandparents and aunts uncles sisters and brothers , mothers and father, I beg for peace in Gaza , I pray for world wide peace several times a day. hoping god will hear me and bring peace to these poor souls

Hate kills the soul.

Has anyone checked out the video where the Israel people are on a hilltop trying to see it all. Sipping coffee.
One woman says I hope there is nothing left but the ground when they are done.

Thank you csmonut. I find it sad that plants and people got trampled. I also find it sad that Qassams are made of fertilizer. Both sides need to beg their governments to work harder to solve the problem. But if they don't, then what? Who has the right to live? Both. By the way, most products from Israel have some connection to the West Bank and Gaza. In fact, the businesses sustain peace better than anything. Still, even I'm not dumb enough to buy corporate crap:)

Highroller,
For sure you are right when you say the people need to rise up.
Until and unless the people on both sides rise up and scream for the hatred to stop, there will never be peace.
Until then, this devestation will continue.

Until Hamas quits firing rockets, and the Israeli people rise up against the war, it will continue.
Until the Palestinian people rise up against Hamas, this will continue.
Israel has done much wrong concerning Gaza, but Hamas' way is not the answer.

I feel for the women and children that bear the brunt of man's war.

By their silence, they give their consent.

Israel must negotiate directly with Hamas
In 1775, British statesman Edmund Burke made the following statement to Parliament about the American colonies, "The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment, but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered."
The citizens of Israel, a democracy, should rise up and demand that their government use other means besides devastating force to find a way to a just peace with Hamas, the elected government of Gaza, and with the Palestinians on the West Bank.
To have rockets fired at Israeli towns is intolerable, but also the Palestinians in Gaza have lived under intolerable conditions for the last 40 years. They have been treated worse than Britain treated its colonies. Palestinians, 1.4 million of them, were forced to live with 8,000 privileged Israeli citizens - settlers who controlled 40 percent of the arable land. The Palestinians existed on less than $2 a day.
Worse was yet to come. Israel removed the settlers, and destroyed their homes, then controlled Gaza by land, sea, and air. Gaza was converted into an open-air prison. Twelve thousand new settlers were allowed to occupy Palestinian land in the West Bank.
The only hope for peace is for Israel to negotiate face-to-face with Hamas. Israel must grant the Palestinians the freedom to move commerce in and out of Gaza in return for an end to the firing of rockets into Israel.

poem by distinguished South African poet Rassool Snyman.

Jesus in Gaza

By Rassool Jibraeel Snyman

I met Jesus in Gaza last night

Nailed to a concrete wall

Impaled by shrapnel

Through hands and feet

Wearing a crown of barbed wire

And a countenance of sorrow

At his feet

A bloodied child

Frozen

Still

Cold

Tattered were her clothes

Ugly were her wounds

I wept for her

He wept for us

Soldiers with blues stars

And white apparel

Stared stonily

Coldly

With no emotion on their faces

And death in their souls

Moonlight reflected on their guns

And their dead eyes

I met Jesus in Gaza last night

I’ve aged a thousand years

And died a thousand times

I met Jesus in Gaza last night

Life will never be the same

(South Africa – January 29, 2009; "Tales of Extreme Sanity")

Don't you see a pattern here?

Tear down paradise, put up a (GM) parking lot.

Excerpt:

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization announced Friday that nearly all 10,000 small farms in Gaza have been damaged and many completely destroyed following attacks by Israel that started on 27 December. Some 27,500 people that depend on farming or fishing have lost land, crops, equipment, or animals.

The FAO's Luigi Damiani, who has surveyed the damage, told New Scientist from Jerusalem that a lot of the damage was done by Israeli tanks, and the bulldozers that went with them. "On land used to run tanks, cultivation has been wiped out, including the strawberry fields in the north," he says.

Tanks also damaged irrigation pipes and wells. "We had just distributed small containers for crop storage," says Damiani. "They're all destroyed."