What is "israel"? Somebody please....?

[Kirkland Laing]

You may wish to toe the popular line and believe that things are that simplistic but no amount of hyperbole will ever describe such a complex issue. Comparing the Palestinians situation to a concentration camp or referring to it as apartheid just lets you off the hook when it comes to analyzing the facts with an open mind.

But it is and has described as much by influential scholars; Chomsky and Finklestein would readily agree with me. It is a concentration camp minus the gas chambers and moreso now that so much infrastructure has been destroyed. It was no accident and the bombing carefully targetted to wreak as much havoc with Palestinian lives as possible.

There is nothing simplistic in the fact that Gazan's are camped in and restricted by land, air and sea, they are denied basic equipment, food, or even materials to rebuild long term damaged property. You keep a populace hungry, deprived, poor and bound and what you have is a concentration camp. It is easy to end it and Israel is in control of it. All this talk of rockets is absurd when you see how Gazan's are forced to live.

It is you who deny that we can call it a concentration camp or Israel/West Bank as apartheid. It seems it is you with the closed mind on the topic.

Time to break the taboo and say what Gaza is: a concentration camp

You have quoted Arthur Silber's article. He identifies himself openly as being part of the "9/11 truth and justice movement". He does this whilst decrying both "the delusional stupid left" and "right". He is almost as big a douche as Chomsky. People in Gaza elected Hamas an organization that revels in the death of innocent civilians and uses them as human shields. The idea of martyrdom is for them a glorious concept. If you are so open minded then can you explain how they have escaped any blame? Why have you not mentioned them killing their own people yesterday and dragging their bodies around on the back of a motorcycle? Why have you not mentioned the million ton of aid given to Gaza by Israel? Why have you not mentioned the tons of weapons smuggled into Palestine for the express purpose of murdering Israeli civilians ?

Why would you suggest that a bombing campaign quite obviously aimed at military targets is AIMED at civilians? Is it because you have already decided who the bogeyman is and can not complicate things by seeing anything else? It seems that you, Brockton and Kirkland are so intent on drawing attention to the plight of Palestinian civilians that you can not countenance the idea that Israel has any right to protect it's own civilians and that Hamas and the mis goverment of Gaza is not the fault of Hamas? In an effort to appear even handed it appears that the monopoly on suffering that people accuse Jews of exercising has been inverted to blame them for everything.

The people of Gaza are often treated in Israels hospitals, they are not lined up to have their gold teeth extracted. They are not being stripped naked and asked to leave their clothes in neat piles. Their hair is not being used to fill mattresses. They are not being experimented on and injected with diseases. They are not being sent to the gas chambers. They are not living in a concentration camp or living under a system of apartheid where the colour of their skin is enough to condemn them.

Don't the Palestinians have the right to defend themselves? Bearing in mind that the majority of them have been ethnically cleansed from their homes and land and are now living in refugee camps, the most densely polulated places on earth. And that for nearly half a century they've been living under a militaryoccupation that every other nation has declared illegal in various UN resolutions? If the aggressor have a right to defend themselves, don't the aggressee also have the same right?

The right of resistance to military occupation and ethnic cleansing is guaranteed under international law. Don't the Palestinians have the same rights as you or I would have if we were living under occupation?