ginandtacos.com wrote:Haven't you people learned anything from the American media? When Arabs attack and kill Israeli civilians, it is an act of terrorism. When Israel responds with conventional military tactics which inevitably kill Arab civilians, it is a legitimate response.

galanter wrote:

I can't believe you can't see the difference between killing civilians with helicopter-mounted rockets and killing civilians with a vest full of RDX.

I can't believe you can't see the difference between targeting military leaders who intentionally hide behind women and children, and targeting restaurants knowing full well that women and children are your primary target.

Unfortunately, the only way to stop Hizbullah actions against the Israeli forces in south Lebanon is to inflict heavy blows on the passive population...Then Hizbullah would be loathed.

Andrew L. wrote:

ginandtacos.com wrote:Haven't you people learned anything from the American media? When Arabs attack and kill Israeli civilians, it is an act of terrorism. When Israel responds with conventional military tactics which inevitably kill Arab civilians, it is a legitimate response.

Fuck'n eh. This is what we have nation-states and parliamentary capitalism and the rule of law for: a monopoly on legitimate violence. You aren't a nation? Well, fuck off, you have no politics, you are cowardly and barbaric and we will bomb you or torture you or starve you or own you as post-colonial slaves--nothing else befits the savage fascists you are. Simple. Case closed.

AlBStern wrote:

Andrew L. wrote:

ginandtacos.com wrote:Haven't you people learned anything from the American media? When Arabs attack and kill Israeli civilians, it is an act of terrorism. When Israel responds with conventional military tactics which inevitably kill Arab civilians, it is a legitimate response.

Fuck'n eh. This is what we have nation-states and parliamentary capitalism and the rule of law for: a monopoly on legitimate violence. You aren't a nation? Well, fuck off, you have no politics, you are cowardly and barbaric and we will bomb you or torture you or starve you or own you as post-colonial slaves--nothing else befits the savage fascists you are. Simple. Case closed.

The difference is intent. Regardless of how reckless it is to think you can 100% effectively pick individuals off with rockets while avoiding killing any innocent civilians, it isn't the same as walking into a night club filled with nothing but innocent civilians and blowing it up. There is a reason the Israelis are not just using the biggest bombs they can find.

By fostering Shia resistance, Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 created a space for Hizbollah, who carried out the first suicide bombings in the early 1980s. Israel began supporting Hamas in the late 1980s after the decision was taken to strengthen Islamic groups in order to weaken Arafat and divide the Palestinians among themselves. The Islamic University of Gaza was created, with the approval of the Defence Ministry; when cinemas in Gaza were stormed by Islamic groups and restaurants set on fire for selling alcohol, Israeli soldiers stood by and watched. All this is described by Christoph Reuter in My Life Is a Weapon. Hizbollah in turn would gain a permanent foothold inside Israel when it offered vital support to the 415 leading cadres of Hamas and Islamic Jihad expelled into Southern Lebanon by Yitzhak Rabin following the abduction and murder of an Israeli soldier in December 1992. It has always been a paradox for Western observers that Hizbollah, which promotes an Iranian-style Islamic revolution for the whole of the Middle East (the organisation was created following the arrival in Lebanon of a thousand Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the early 1980s), is also the most efficient provider of welfare and support for displaced Palestinians in Lebanon and the Occupied Territories.

That Israeli policy engendered suicide bombing was acknowledged by Rabin. Having originally promoted indiscriminate bombing of South Lebanon 'until there's nobody left there' - he was defence minister at the time - he finally came to the view that 'terror cannot be finished by one war; it's total nonsense.' By replacing 'PLO terrorism' with 'Shia terrorism', he acknowledged, Israel had done 'the worst thing' in the struggle against terrorism: 'Not one PLO terrorist,' he said, 'has ever made himself into a live bomb.'

According to Eyad El-Sarraj, the founder and director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, today's suicide attackers are, for the most part, children of the first intifada. Studies show that during the first uprising, 55 per cent of children saw their fathers being humiliated or beaten by Israeli soldiers. Martyrdom - sacrificing oneself for God - increases its appeal when the image of the earthly father bites the dust. 'It's despair,' El-Sarraj states baldly, 'a despair where living becomes no different from dying.' When life is constant degradation, death is the only source of pride. 'In 1996, practically all of us were against the martyr operations,' Kamal Aqeel, the acting mayor of Khan Yunis in Gaza, explains. 'Not any longer . . . We all feel that we can no longer bear the situation as it is; we feel that we'd simply explode under all this pressure of humiliation.'

Andrew L. wrote:
Suicide bombing is the desperate reaction of subjects of foreign occupation. This is simply a fact. It may not be a just tactic, but wherever it occurs it is an indication of a radical imbalance of military, economic, and political power.

eliya wrote:Once they're in Iran, there's no chance that their parents would see them again.

galanter wrote:

Andrew L. wrote:
Suicide bombing is the desperate reaction of subjects of foreign occupation. This is simply a fact. It may not be a just tactic, but wherever it occurs it is an indication of a radical imbalance of military, economic, and political power.

So when Timothy McVeigh used a truck bomb to kill 100's of civilians would you say that was a justifiable action because of the radical imbalance of military, economic, and political power he was up against?

Of course not.

For his book, however, Pape started with the bombings themselves – every documented case between 1980 and 2004 – and noticed some suggestive common threads. Foreign occupation, it seems – not religion – is the core motivating factor behind suicide terrorism. From Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank to Sikhs in India, from the jihadists of 9/11 to the secular Marxist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka – for all of these, it is "a nationalistic response."

Professor Pape says that while al-Qaeda terrorists are twice as likely to be from a country where radical Salafist/Wahhabist Islam is widely practiced, they are 10 times more likely to have come from a country that has U.S. troops stationed in it. In most cases, this foreign military presence is not hostile in a traditional sense, since the local governments have agreed to their stay. But according to a Saudi poll after 9/11, 95 percent of educated Saudi males between the ages of 25 and 41 agreed with bin Laden's goal of driving Americans off their holy land.

No suicide bombers have ever come from Iran, where there are no foreign troops. Iraq had never seen a suicide bombing on its soil before U.S. troops arrived in 2003. While Ayatollah Khomeini spent the 1980s criticizing American culture, many people agreed, but none resorted to suicide bombing. When bin Laden cited U.S. forces in the land of Mecca and Medina, men hopped on planes with knives.

The root cause of suicide terrorism is occupation, not Islam, and not the other way around, as the War Party and its ill-informed adherents so righteously claim.

"Don't you remember Sept. 11? We were attacked!"

As Harry Browne has pointed out, history does not begin on 9/11. In fact, American intervention in the Middle East dates back to 1919, when U.S. participation in World War I helped turn the entire region over to the British and the French, who then drew borders to their own liking for the states of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, what was Palestine, etc.

Since the Second World War, the U.S. government has dominated each of the Middle Eastern states at one time or another, and consistently a majority of them. It has supported bloody coups; backed fascist monsters like Shah Reza Pahlavi, Saddam Hussein, and Hosni Mubarak; armed and financed both sides of wars; propped up puppet kings, sultans, and emirs; and helped the Israeli government kill, steal, and destroy with our money. To top it off, it has now waged a bloody war and a terrible blockade of Iraq – all from bases in the "land of two Holy Places," the Arabian Peninsula.