6/15/2003: Palestinians swarm for body parts

[Undertoad]

Little Green Footballs is my source for these shots. LGF is roughly dedicated to documenting radical Islamism and its activities and results, and has found this odd practice of Palestinians. When the IDF blows up one of the bad guys via a missile attack, tons of Pals rush the scene in a frenzy, searching for body parts. When they find something they hold it up and treasure it, sometimes parading it through the streets in a fervor, chanting Islamic slogans.



On the face of it, these things seem barbaric. LGF's tendency is to label the Pals a sort of blood cult, with children being taught hatred and death and destruction from infancy.

I do think that's a part of it. Even with the understanding that LGF is heavily biased, the factual information it presents just can't be ignored. It shows that the Palestinian leaders have cultivated the radical elements of their society for a very long time. It ensures a ready stream of suicide terrorists. It produces a public actually happy with the terrible conditions that result from complete economic collapse and disorder. (Their fervor instructs them that things are actually going well, y'see...)

While our natural western tendency is to find some kind of moral equivalence here, in fact doing that kind of thing often produces a complete misunderstanding of the real situation, and an instinct to explain away behavior like this.

In this case I feel we shouldn't. Whatever your political leaning, drop it; this is a cultural/religious thing. Their reaction to death is to truly celebrate it in detail as a victory for their side... no matter who dies. They love the death. That's wrong. No moral equivalence this time. Sorry.

[Stonan]

The Islamic faith states that anyone who dies while killing 'infidels' is promised a seat at Allah's table (or at his right hand or something like that). Also any 'infidels' killed by someone of the Islamic faith is 'redeamed' and their soul is sent to Allah.

I guess you could say that the Christian God says 'Thou shalt not kill' and Allah says 'Thou shalt kill infidels and yourself'

(BTW: this is just an educated guess from snipets of info. Please tell me if I'm wrong... )

[xoxoxoBruce]

Also any 'infidels' killed by someone of the Islamic faith is 'redeamed' and their soul is sent to Allah.

Damn, I never heard that! How do you convince them not to kill when they believe they're doing the victim a favor, ie saving their soul.
I wonder what % of the arab population are Pals? Also, what do the rest of the arabs think about the Pals. Do they feel it's like garbage men... I don't want to do it but I'm glad someone does?
These are rhetorical UT.

[rumi]

<i>It shows that the Palestinian leaders have cultivated the radical elements of their society for a very long time. It ensures a ready stream of suicide terrorists.
It produces a public actually happy with the terrible conditions that result from complete economic collapse and disorder. (Their fervor instructs them that things are actually going well, y'see...)
In this case I feel we shouldn't. Whatever your political leaning, drop it; this is a cultural/religious thing. Their reaction to death is to truly celebrate it in detail as a victory for their side... no matter who dies. They love the death. That's wrong. No moral equivalence this time.
</i>

No, you simply don't understand. It's totally idiotic to suggest that any group of people would be happy with such terrible conditions-- humans are humans. It might make you feel superior to them, which helps justifiy the violence against them, but religion is not a particularly significant factor; many Palestinians are Christian or secular, after all.

Essentially here you have a population of poor indigenous people who have been driven from their land and inhumanely oppressed by a bunch of Europeans. That they have survived such a brutal occupation is an achievement in itself. They are not celebrating death-- it's the Israelis who tore this body to shreds, remember. They are simply honouring their war dead. Yeah, it may seem gruesome to you, but then again, you aren't surrounded by dead countrymen on a daily basis.

As for the suicide bombers-- yeah, they are horrific and terrible. But it's not hard to see how they develop. They don't come from the Palestinian leadership, which is non-religious and which the bombers don't actually respect (would you blow yourself up for bush?) They are the by-product of israeli aggression-- if another people invaded, stole your land, poured racist scorn over you, killed your family members, collectively tortured your people, you might end up hating enough to blow yourself up to. All humans have their breaking points.



<i>While our natural western tendency is to find some kind of moral equivalence here, in fact doing that kind of thing often produces a complete misunderstanding of the real situation, and an instinct to explain away behavior like this.</i>

Your smugness is unjustified. It has nothing to do with being eastern or western; it has everything to do with the torture endured by the palestinian people, paid for with our tax dollars.




<i>I guess you could say that the Christian God says 'Thou shalt not kill' and Allah says 'Thou shalt kill infidels and yourself'

(BTW: this is just an educated guess from snipets of info. Please tell me if I'm wrong... )</i>

This is not an educated guess, anymore than The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was written by Barbara Streisand. This is plain old bigotry.

[richlevy]

Originally posted by Stonan

I guess you could say that the Christian God says 'Thou shalt not kill' and Allah says 'Thou shalt kill infidels and yourself'

(BTW: this is just an educated guess from snipets of info. Please tell me if I'm wrong... )

I think you're oversimplifying the situation. For one thing, to imply that Christianity has forsaken violence in its history and that Islam is only about violence would be an oversimplification. It might be more correct to state that Christianity, at least at the upper levels, outgrew violence. During the Dark Ages, the word 'heretic' was as much a death sentence as 'infidel'. Personally, any belief which considers strangling you before you were burned to be their version of 'compassionate conservatism' needs to grow up.

Religions provide social order. Social order depends on belief in the religion, in this case belief in a comfy afterlife for putting up with s**t in this one. Anything which challenges those beliefs, say a large population of unbelievers, is inconvenient and can be seen as threat by their very existence.

A good, if long book on the subject is Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History. I have not come even close to finishing this book, it is 750 pages.

While looking for the Amazon link, I also ran across this book. The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict Between Islam and Christianity

What it comes down to is that popular religions are a lot like species of animals. To survive, animals have to be either prolific or tough and nasty. Yes, fluffy bunnies are survivors, but in general survivors are spiky, venomous, armored creatures you would not want to adopt.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are thousands of years old. Part of that was by being prolific, but part was also by adapting and countering threats to their existence. Judaism was dispersed after the second revolt and the destruction of the temple. In our case it was more a matter of trying to blend in wherever we went. Once the Roman Empire became the Holy Roman Empire, Christianity didn't have to hide from anyone.

Now that we are in the third millenium, I hope we can adopt a wait-and-see attitude as to who is right about the nature of G-d. I personally am a little tired of killing in the name of this individual or that individual, who, if one can believe their followers, are actually nice guys.

As far as I know, religion, like law, is a human invention. This means that it is imperfect, and sometimes bloody.

I'm still waiting for everyone to grow up.

[Undertoad]

<i>Essentially here you have a population of poor indigenous people who have been driven from their land and inhumanely oppressed by a bunch of Europeans.</i>

But when you think about it, that describes an awful lot of colonies and former colonies. Some cultures produce a Ghandi in response to occupation. And some produce the above. What's the difference? Both are only human, why the vastly different response?

They have now been offered a state. Some of their response to the offer was to kill or maim 120 innocent bystanders and bus riders with rusty nails. A majority of Pals believe that "occupation" includes the entire land of Israel. Those are the facts of the last few weeks; how does this square with your understanding of the situation?

[Torrere]

Originally posted by Undertoad
A majority of Pals believe that "occupation" includes the entire land of Israel.

Doesn't it?



UT, stuff like this is happening in many different places, and I fear that Ghandi was the anomaly. Situations such as this are not something that I like to see or recognize, but they are happening in way too many places now to ignore. I (somewhat) blame modern weaponry for allowing extremists to use children to fight; how the wars have been fought has changed in modern times, though the animosity has been there for generations in many cases. Children are being trained to hate the enemy in many battlefields around the globe. Children are robbed from their parents and forced to join fighting forces at gunpoint. That is wrong, but most Causes realize that their Cause will die if the impressionable children do not support them.

In a serious conflict, there is going to be hatred. Whether atrocities are committed by helicopter or on the streets, they are still atrocities, something that I worry that people forget, the assumption that authority and establishment make right. The victims that the Palestinians can get their hands on are (probably) either conceived of as martyrs or defeated oppressors; both are worth parading through the street.


richlevy: Christianity might not have had to hide any more, but there were still many struggles between the various sects of Christianity and they still fought the people on the outside (such as the Native Americans and the Muslims). How many people died trying to decide whether Jesus Christ was made of God-stuff or human-stuff? How many people died trying to decide whether the Pope held the keys to Heaven?

[Griff]

UT has exposed two cults in this diatribe, one among the Palestinian people and one among the American people. It takes a special belief system to take a photo of the IDF's life affirming activity and spin it into a de-humanizing rant about the person blown up. Insert cult like anti- intervention rant here.

[rumi]

But when you think about it, that describes an awful lot of colonies and former colonies. Some cultures produce a Ghandi in response to occupation. And some produce the above. What's the difference? Both are only human, why the vastly different response?

The two cases are just too different. The Indians numbered in the hundreds of millions; the British could not crush them militarily or ethnically cleanse them from their land-- it just wasn't feasible, nor were the British interested in stealing and settling the land. Nor were the Indians so brutally decimated. Yes, the British performed massacres, but they could never have made life so miserable for every Indian as the Israelis have done for every Palestinian man, woman, and child. So nonviolence was a viable option in India. The Palestinian population is small enough to control and grind away at. If there were a Palestinian Gandhi, we simply wouldn't hear about him, or he would be targetted by the Israelis, or run over by a bulldozer as the current non-violent activists. There are plenty of non-violent activists in Palestine, and I admire them greatly, but we don't hear much about them. We only hear about the crazy suicide bombers which fuel our stereotypes of Palestinians as an entirely barbaric people who just hate because they are taught/born to hate.


They have now been offered a state. Some of their response to the offer was to kill or maim 120 innocent bystanders and bus riders with rusty nails. A majority of Pals believe that "occupation" includes the entire land of Israel. Those are the facts of the last few weeks; how does this square with your understanding of the situation?

The occupation (no need for quotes, that's the legal word for it, and even Sharon has used it) of course includes the whole land of what is now called Israel. However, the majority of Palestinians do not insist on taking it all back; they realize that that is now an unrealistic goal and all they want is 22% of their land back-- the 1967 territories. The majority accept that! But they have never been offered a <b>viable</b> state-- if you bother to check out the details, you will see that they are being screwed. The Israelies are trying to take as much of that remaining 22% of possible, offering either nothing or worthless land in return, and maintaining control over water and other important things in the reservations they are offering the Palestinians.

Here's another chucklehead that deserves an inoperable tumor at the base of their spine.

rumi -

Do you ever think the Palestinians will get what they want when extremists make it so easy for the Israelis to justify the occupation? Why do you think popular support for the occupation in Israel is so high?

Surely rational minds such as yourself are needed to calm the tensions; unfortunately, they are <b>never</b> heard over the extremists. Whereas the extremists in Israel are despicable and need a reality check, those on the Palestinian side are <b>even worse</b> (in <b>deliberately targetting innocent women and children</b>) and make it a cakewalk for Sharon and other far-right politicians in Israel to justify "retaliatory" attacks on Palestinians.

To the world, a girl shot point blank in the head in her home is far harder to justify than one who happened to be in the car of her militant father when it was hit by a missile.

[xoxoxoBruce]

deliberately targetting innocent women and children

So it's OK to target innocent men?
Isreali women and children have no part in the persecution of Palistinians?
Palistinian women and children aren't "innocent"?
IMHO, the blame has to be shared by EVERYONE in the region. There are no innocents.

Originally posted by xoxoxoBruce
So it's OK to target innocent men?

Absolutely not. But let's not kid ourselves - men <b>are</b> more able to defend themselves.

If you <b>had</b> to kill someone, would it be easier to shoot a grown man or a five year old girl?

Isreali women and children have no part in the persecution of Palistinians?

Children? Are you serious? No, they don't. Just like Palestinian kids don't have anything to do with the persecution of the Israelis.

Adults on each side are responsible for the persecution of the other.

Lemme ask you this: when was the last time you heard of an Israeli woman suicide bomber?

Palistinian women and children aren't "innocent"?

Are you asking stupid questions just to ask them? I'm not sure how you could infer that from what I wrote, since I said nothing of the sort. The innocent ones, of course, are innocent. No offense, but quit being a retard.

IMHO, the blame has to be shared by EVERYONE in the region. There are no innocents.

Okay, then why are you asking stupid questions like the ones above? You seem to imply that, indeed, children are guilty.

Blanket thinking like this is what breeds extremism. Extremist Palestinians think along the same lines, as do extremist Israelis. There <b>are</b> innocents in the conflict, both on the Palestinian and Israeli side. They are killed on each side, by the other and sometimes by their own. The difference is that, generally speaking, innocents are not targeted by the IDF, whereas they <b>are</b> targeted by Hamas, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Islamic Jihad, etc.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally posted by dave

Absolutely not. But let's not kid ourselves - men are more able to defend themselves.

Against hidden bombs and attack helicopters armed with missiles? We're not talking fisticuffs here.

[rumi]

<i>Lemme ask you this: when was the last time you heard of an Israeli woman suicide bomber?</i>

When was the last time you heard of a Palestinian Apache helicopter strike killing 9 children? A Palestinian tank running over disabled, elderly Israelis in their homes? A Palestinian F16 firing into the Knesset?

One of the reasons there are suicide bombers is the grim fact that they very few ways of attacking their enemy. If our tax dollars paid for tanks, missiles, bombs, bulldozers, fighter jets etc. for the Palestinians, then the suicide bombers would surely use those instead of their primitive explosives, and save their own lives in the process.

Similarly, it's unfair to say Palestinians are worse because they shoot 5 year olds in the head while Israelis kill innocents only incidentally. (By the way, I think anyone who shoots a child -- Palestininian or Israeli -- is just evil.)

-The Israelis kill a lot of children, and intentionally, with their tanks and rubber coated bullets. That's a well-documented fact, and one of the reasons the Israelis don't want an international force there to monitor crimes and keep the peace in the occupied territories.
-The majority (or at least a very significant minority) of Palestinian casualties are children. The stats show that is the Palestinian kids who are dying, much more so than the Israelis... by a factor of 7 to 1 or something like that.
-In our legal system, there is no difference between killing someone intentionally and killing someone unintentionally while trying to kill someone else, if you know that there is a likelyhood that innocents will die.

You can't say the Israelis are better or more humane at all. They are simply better equipped to kill with more efficiency.

We should simply stop equipping them... and insist that they do the right thing. The violence will disappear naturally, because the root cause --the occupation-- will be gone.