Demonstrators try to attack US embassy in Beirut

perpetual cycle sad sad

Hamas’s desire to best Hezbollah’s achievements is natural, of course, but, more to the point, it is radicalizing. One of the reasons, among many, that Hamas felt compelled to break its cease-fire with Israel last month was to prove its potency to Muslims impressed with Hezbollah.

Another reality worth considering concerns theology. Hamas and Hezbollah emerged from very different streams of Islam: Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood; Hezbollah is an outright Iranian proxy that takes its inspiration from the radical Shiite politics of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. But the groups share a common belief that Jews are a cosmological evil, enemies of Islam since Muhammad sought refuge in Medina.

Periodically, advocates of negotiation suggest that the hostility toward Jews expressed by Hamas is somehow mutable. But in years of listening, I haven’t heard much to suggest that its anti-Semitism is insincere. Like Hezbollah, Hamas believes that God is opposed to a Jewish state in Palestine. Both groups are rhetorically pitiless, though, again, Hamas sometimes appears to follow the lead of Hezbollah.

Hamas was either astonishingly cynical in provoking Israel's response by escalating its rocket fire, or it was astonishingly stupid.

1. Either it anticipated the Israeli Defense Forces military response and didn't care about the consequences for innocent Gazans.

2. Or it failed to appreciate what it was about to let Gaza in for.

Hamas has reaped the terror it has sown.

And now Hamas has nothing but a stack of dead bodies to show for it's Jihad.

That won't stop Hamas from the usual al takiyah - lies and bluster - the mullahs who puppeteer Hamas from Damascus & Iran will blather on about the great Victory over the Zionist entity...bla bla bla
as they yell from their oil-funded safe houses...and fought to the last Gazan.

And as we speak Hamas is being ordered by Iran to break the ceasefire yet again.

Same old in the Middle East, sadly...

Robert Fisk's book

DD) referring to torturing techniques administered on Iranian dissident groups opposing the Shah's regime. Who taught the SAVAK the 'art' of 'body roasting', ' psychological methods of rough interrogations' ` nail plucking' `sole beating' etcetera? And worse still, who provided the SAVAK with the related equipment, gadgets, listening instruments, mistreated medicines, poisoned needles, radioactive feeding that penetrates the human bodies without leaving traces? This `hitech' calls for well-trained suppliers who possess the know-how and the means, of which, as you can appreciate, the Iranians have been lacking.
You have alluded to CIA, MI6 and the Israeli Mossad.
The irony of the matter though is that, all of a sudden, Britain and the USA have been criticizing the Shah - when his voice became prominent in the Oil Industry - that he had been using `Nazi' methods of incarcerations and interrogations of the Iranian opposition groups and that the Shah had actually transformed his country into a Police State. (Same accusations they had many times heaped on Abdul Nasser, Saddam Hussein and Abdul Hamid el Sarraj).
The drama of the matter is that Great Britain and the USA have `now', by the pressure of multiplying security events after 9/11, applied similar methods as the ex- `police states' to guard against the same `fanatical groups' that had once been harassing Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

On December 2, 2002 the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed his name at the bottom of a document that listed eighteen techniques of interrogation--techniques that defied international definitions of torture. The Rumsfeld Memo authorized the controversial interrogation practices that later migrated to Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, as part of the policy of extraordinary rendition. From a behind-the-scenes vantage point, Phillipe Sands investigates how the Rumsfeld Memo set the stage for a divergence from the Geneva Convention and the Torture Convention and holds the individual gatekeepers in the Bush administration accountable for their failure to safeguard international law.
The Torture Team delves deep into the Bush administration to reveal:

No. Israel is apart from the rest of the world.

WAR CRIMES.

Do you want to live among criminals?

The Palestinians are forced to stay in the ghetto that Israel has put the modern day Berlin Wall around.

History has a habit of repeating itself.
Wait.....the wall will come down ONE DAY and WHAT THEN?

no no RonenA....90% is the jews fault, so please settle down.....now, this direct war crime attack by Israel on innocent unarmed civilians (at link) , well, this is 100% jews fault...but you can have your opinion too. I'm just sick and tired of Israels lies and bullshit to make the OTHER side look bad..now its the TRUTH and the TRUTH happens to make Israel the lier and deceiver it is. The Bible warned us of Israel

The paper also says that the unquestioning relationship with Israel actually makes winning the war on terror a much more difficult task.

More important, saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around. Support for Israel is not the only source of anti-American terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror more difficult. There is no question that many Al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians. Unconditional support for Israel makes it easier for extremists to rally popular support and to attract recruits.
As for so-called rogue states in the Middle East, they are not a dire threat to vital US interests, except inasmuch as they are a threat to Israel. Even if these states acquire nuclear weapons – which is obviously undesirable – neither America nor Israel could be blackmailed, because the blackmailer could not carry out the threat without suffering overwhelming retaliation. The danger of a nuclear handover to terrorists is equally remote, because a rogue state could not be sure the transfer would go undetected or that it would not be blamed and punished afterwards. The relationship with Israel actually makes it harder for the US to deal with these states. Israel’s nuclear arsenal is one reason some of its neighbors want nuclear weapons, and threatening them with regime change merely increases that desire.
Justin Raimundo of Antiwar.com, a long time critic of the activities of the Israeli lobby in the US, writes that the authors also cite incidents when the lobby groups went after Jews who were advocating a different approach to US policy in the region.

When Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress, wrote a letter to President Bush expressing his opposition to the "security wall," and asking that the US put pressure on Israel to stop construction, he was accused of "perfidy" by leading figures in the Lobby. The nature of the attacks revealed an attitude toward Israel not unlike that held by the Communists of the Cold War era toward the Soviet Union. As Mearsheimer and Walt point out:

Paying ISRAEL to do AMERICA'S dirty work is only making more HATE against America. America plans to suck the Iranians into the Gaza conflict so they can hit the nuclear power plant in Busheir in Iran....on behalf of America.

Commons debate on Gaza - live
Read what happened when MPs debated the Middle East Crisis

3.00pm: David Liddington, a shadow foreign minister, is opening the debate for the Tories. He says that 90% of Israelis support what their government is doing. A Liberal Democrat asks him to condemn the "totally disproportionate" Israeli response to the Hamas attacks. Liddington appears unhappy with that phrase. "I think the key point to make is that we need to see an immediate end to the Israeli military action and the rocket attacks on Israel ... We condemn the disproportionate use of force and the targeting of civilians. We regret the attack today on the UN headquarters in Gaza, which is wholly unacceptable. It is welcome that the Israeli authorities have recognised the folly of that particular ....................

3.11pm: He says he was in Syria and Lebanon last week and was struck by the "images of death and mutilation" in Gaza broadcast on Arab TV. He got a feeling for the "sense of rage" felt in those countries.

3.15pm: Sir Gerald Kaufman delivers a blistering speech which starts with a reference to his grandmother being killed by the Nazis. "My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers to kill Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza," he says.

3.16pm: He says that he is a supporter of Israel. "Golda Meir [the former Israeli PM] was my friend," he says.

"When, however, the fighting ends, there will still be 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza and 2.5 million Palestinians on the West Bank who are being treated like dirt by Israel.

"The time will come when it is time for our government to make it clear to the Israeli government that its conduct and policies are unacceptable and to impose a total arms embargo on Israel."

3.29pm: Ed Davey, the Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman, is next. He speaks of Israel as a candid friend.

3.32pm: "People who believe in the right of Israel to exist have to be, at this time, frank with her because she is making such a historic mistake ... Israel needs to be assured that we are with her against the Hamas rockets but we won't stand by and see her jeopardise her long-term future. The truth is that these actions are radicalising people across the world. They are not just radicalising people against Israel, but they are radicalising them against the west," says Davey.

3.43pm: Roger Godsiff (Lab) also condemns Israel.

3.46pm: "If they had sought to promote trade and economic development with the people of Gaza, instead of building a wall around Gaza, then they would have had a better chance of persuading the people of Gaza that trade was better than conflict," he says.

Israel had managed to make peace with its old enemies Egypt and Jordan and it was in negotiations, through intermediaries, with Syria, he says.

3.50pm: "The idea that the people of Gaza should suffer collective punishment for electing a Hamas government and that they should be blockaded into submission until the government has renounced its reason for existence was, frankly, disingenuous," he says. He also criticises the "simplistic view" taken by the Bush administration in the US.

'''''''''

Marsha Singh, Labour, criticises Hamas for the rocket attacks. If someone fired a rocket at his house, he would fire one back, he says.

But the Israeli response has been "completely and utterly disproprotionate". In fact, the word "disproportionate" is "completely inadequate", he says, compared to the suffering that has been inflicted on Palestinians. Around 1,000 civilians have been killed and thousands have been injured. Between 45,000 and 50,000 children have been displaced.

News
World news
Gaza
Israel accused of war crimes over 12-hour assault on Gaza village
White flags ignored and houses bulldozed with families inside, claim residents

Fida Qishta in Khuza'a and Peter Beaumont in London
The Observer, Sunday 18 January 2009
Article history
Israel stands accused of perpetrating a series of war crimes during a sustained 12-hour assault on a village in southern Gaza last week in which 14 people died.

In testimony collected from residents of the village of Khuza'a by the Observer, it is claimed that Israeli soldiers entering the village:

• attempted to bulldoze houses with civilians inside;

• killed civilians trying to escape under the protection of white flags;

Ian Black, Middle East editor
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 18 January 2009 11.00 GMT
Article history
Three weeks after the launch of Israel's offensive against the Gaza Strip, its unilateral ceasefire marks a new stage in the conflict rather than the end of a shocking story that has reverberated across the Middle East and the world.

Ehud Olmert's declaration that Israel had attained its military goals was met almost at once with the launch of more rockets from across the border – a defiant signal that Hamas can still fight - shortly before it announced a week long ceasefire. With five Israeli divisions deployed in Gaza, ground attacks could resume at any moment.

Hamas has not run up the white flag. Israel's finger is still on the trigger. Gaza and its 1.5 million people remain under blockade. There is no agreement between these bitter enemies. Nothing fundamental has changed, except that some 1,200 Palestinians and 13 Israelis have died.

Olmert's claim that Hamas has been "badly beaten" is hard to evaluate, although the heavy bombing of tunnels under the Egyptian border must have squeezed its supply routes. Estimates late last week were that its