Whoopee! My Son's A Suicide Bomber!

It's about religion.

2000 years ago, a guy was born, was nailed to a cross, and rose up into the air.

Because of this, instead of turning to dust when I die, I am going to live forever in heaven.

Now we can go back and forth on this, but you tell me why my belief is any more rational than these folks praise of their son, who is today sitting with Mohammed in heaven, I'll assume.

In other words, no one is asking you to accept his rational. But you do need to accept the fact that people are going to do things in the name of religion that you won't be able to fathom.

 

Natural selection should kick in at some point - systematically weeding out idiots who believe everything they're told does have an upside. If only they weren't taking innocent bystanders with them, though.

 

What the hell are these kids going to do with their lives if they don't become suicide bombers? Unemployment among young men in the occupied territories is over 50%, the population is exploding, and the best education that they can get is provided by Hamas. If the people saw a way to improve their lives, they wouldn't think that the only way to prove their self-worth is by killing themselves.

Economic development is the best long-term weapon that the world has against terrorism.

 

I can't believe you don't expected an answer after that sharon "cleverly" decided to try to kill Rantisi.

Why do you think US was angry about that Sharon move?
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/...2&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y

sharon performed this tactic of refueling the conflict by stupid and many times oversized targeted killings (meaning trying to kill a man and failing but killing many innocents) since he was elected.

And that's what happened, after.
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/302574.html

And Israel answered again
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/302577.html

Now it's up to you to decide who's been an unbelievable moron this time that you're paying attention to the facts in the ground.

 

I'm with the hard-liners...hell, I am a hard-liner...in that it doesn't matter to me why there are any suicide bombings. The act itself is a sign of insanity, and the people who promote those kind of acts need to be eased out of the picture, or have their minds changed.

Just because someone is able to attach a cause to it, doesn't make the act acceptable. You wouldn't accept such an act if it was about getting a pothole fixed. We didn't accept 9/11 because Bin Laden wanted us out of Saudi Arabia or because we weren't Muslim enough for him. There's no way to end a sentence that begins "I killed this innocent person because..." and still retain basic humanity.

Now, what about the Israelis strafing neighborhoods. Usually, I'm fine with it. From what I read about this particular attack from the Ha'aretz article, that was beyond the pale. You can barely, barely make the case that you are targeting a military leader in a hostile civil war, and that given this is wartime you takes your chances. You can barely make the case that if Palestine wants peace, then people like Rantisi can't be walking around free and/or alive. And you can certainly make the case that the IDF has a right to air-condition as many Rantisis and their bodyguards as they please.

But a crowded city street? Sorry, that's awfully close to a war crime, and whoever ordered or perpetrated the attack ought to be looking at a court-martial and a rockpile.

And during allegedly serious negotiations? Again...doesn't look good.

But that still doesn't mean suicide bombing is justified. They're still just insane pawns being used by insane criminals.

 

Who? The suicide bombers or IDF soldiers, pilots and bulldozer drivers? My answer is "Both".

Face it, neither side wants peace and Bush will fail with his "roadmap" just as everyone has failed before him. And before Colin goes all weepy on me, it won't be Bush's fault that he fails because both sides over there are currently being led by people even more stupid than he is.

 

Re: Re: Whoopee! My Son's A Suicide Bomber!

If Osama bin-Laden only got a fair break in life, he'd be a dentist.

 

Fortunately, when we do the same thing, everyone killed is an al-Queda agent.

 

From the Deptartment Of Willfully Missing The Point:

Quit channelling Karl, dude, you're scaring me.

Rich people or people with prospects in life tend not to volunteer to be suicide bombers. Even if they get all warped like OBL, they usually become the ones sending other (usually poorer) people to blow themselves up.

So while material prosperity isn't always a deterrant to idiocy (see "Columbine"), obie has a point that if you are looking forward to a bright, comfortable, nooky-filled future, you're not as likely to go martyr yourself than if you have nothing to look forward to in life but sitting around bored all day and getting slapped around at the IDF checkpoint.

Please note I said "not as likely to" and not "100% guaranteed not to".

 

Re: From the Deptartment Of Willfully Missing The Point:

The 9-11 suicide bombers were anything but poor as well.

In any case, poverty has vastly increased AFTER all the suicide bombs (i.e. this stage of the war). It's more correct to say suicide bombers cause poverty than poverty causes suicide bombers.

 

Re: Re: Re: Whoopee! My Son's A Suicide Bomber!

Yeah, like Osama has ever strapped a explosives belt on himself.

The Palestinians have forever been the lowest of the lower classes in Arab society. It's not like they ever lived high off the hog before the intifada started.

 

You know what? I give up. Let em all kill each other. Sorry, but I dont see any hope here...

 

It's all about sovereignty.

 

Whatever. You KNOW I'm correct. We've done the same thing, except killed a lot more innocent people.

When we killed Qaed Senyan al-Harithi in Yemen (in contrast with all those botched assasination attempts in Iraq), I loved how we claimed that everyone killed was an al-Queda agent. Funny.

 

Re: Re: From the Deptartment Of Willfully Missing The Point:

Like I said...

The 9/11 asshats were the exception because they had to be just educated enough to be able to fly and to hit a target with a modern airliner. They were not the rule.

See obie's response.

The sad fact is that after the intense Palestinian terrorism ended in the mid 70s, Israel decided to wage economic warfare against the Palestinians.

I don't know why they did this when things were looking half-optimistic. Maybe they saw the Palestinian peacefulness as a sign of weakness and deicided to go for the jugular by crushing their spirits. Maybe the Israeli right realized that they needed Paelstinian violence to justify themselves or that cheap Palestinian labor could be effectively used against Israel's own Jewish working class. I don't know. They did decide to cripple the Palestinians economically, however, and unless the idea was to provoke violence, it backfired.

Israel's economic policies towards the occupied territories prevented the development of local industry and agriculture while re-orienting Palestinian labor away from domestic production in the occupied territories and towards work in the Israeli economy.

The Palestinians also suffered from a chronic trade deficit and a myriad of trade restrictions. Since most exports and imports occurred in trade with Israel, the local economy became deeply tied to economic conditions in Israel not only for employment but also for production, trade, and consumption. In fact, the economy of the occupied territories was reduced to being a marketplace for Israeli products by day and a dormitory of low-cost labor for Israeli employers by night.

In 1985, then Minister of Defense, Yitzhak Rabin, said: "there will be no development in the Occupied Territories initiated by the Israeli government, and no permits given for expanding agriculture or industry which may compete with the State of Israel." - Source: The Jerusalem Post, February 15, 1985

By the time the first "Intifada" started in 1987, 47% of the Gaza Strip's total labor force was working inside Israel according to "The Gaza Strip The Political Economy of De-devleopment" by Sara Roy. As a result of these policies, any "Palestinian" economy on the eve of the Oslo process would have been unable to generate domestic employment and was largely dependent on wages earned from work inside Israel.

Also, Israel also used the pre-Oslo years to systematically confiscate Palestinian resources and land, much of which was used to settle Jews in the occupied territories, thus making it virtually impossible for any Palestinian national state to form in the West Bank and Gaza. By the time the first Intifada began in 1987, over 52% of the land in the West Bank and 30% of the land in Gaza had been confiscated for military use or for Jewish settlements.

The Israelis also took far more out in taxes from the occupied territories than they put into them. In 1987 alone, Israel spent $240 million on services and development for Palestinians in the territories but collected $393 million in taxes.

On the eve of Oslo, Israel strengthened the policy, first implemented in 1991, of introducing a restrictive permit system and a policy of "closure". External closure cut the occupied territories off from Egypt, Jordan and Israel inside the Green Line, and thus from the rest of the world. Internal closure cut areas of the territories off from one another.

Palestinian unemployment thus increased as ten thousands of Palestinian workers were separated from their low-wage jobs in Israel. Many of these jobs were permanently lost as Israel imported foreign laborers despite the obvious problem of Palestinian unemployment. According to the U.N., the number of unemployed persons rose from an average of 33,900 during 1990-1993 to an average of 81,3000 in 1994-1998 - an increase of 139.1%. - source: UNSCO January 1999 report

Land confiscation increased during the Oslo period. From the beginning of Oslo in September 1993 until the start of the second Intifada in September 2000, successive Labor and Likud governments in Israel confiscated Palestinian land at the fastest rates since the occupation began in 1967. Settlement building also accelerated the number of (technically illegal) Jewish settlers. Just before the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the Israeli settler population in East Jerusalem overtook the Palestinian population. In the first half of 2000, settlement construction increased 96% over the same period in 1999 and this was under the Labor government of Barak. Expansion of settlements was accompanied by increased bypass road construction. These projects required the demolition of Palestinian homes, destruction of agricultural land and confiscation of other natural resources, such as water and stone quarries.

All of these policies led to increased fragmentation of Palestinian territory into hundreds of non-contiguous units. This fragmentation led to the duplication of services in each enclave and the localization of the Palestinian economy as trade between Gaza and the West Bank, and even within the West Bank, became increasingly difficult. The Palestinian economy became even more vulnerable to external shocks as any improvements in the areas of trade, employment, foreign investment and service delivery were dependent on the loosening of closure by Israel.

The economic model championed by Israel during the Oslo period was one of "closure-free" trade zones which would allow Israeli capital to exploit Palestinian labor in export processing zones along the Israeli border. As Shimon Peres once said, "If you can't take the Palestinians to work, take the work to the Palestinians."

By the time the second Intifada broke out in 2000, the infrastructure of economic warfare was in place and collective economic punishment as a means to bring the Palestinians to their knees was relatively quick and cheap to implement. Experience with comprehensive closure had laid the ground for the current almost total blockade and siege. The fragmentation of the territories had been deeply entrenched through settlements, bypass roads and closures. Furthermore, Israel could give up the approximately 60,000 Palestinian workers with permits who used to work in Israel because Israel had discovered for quite some time that Palestinian labor was indeed expendable and could be easily replaced by foreign labor.

The impact of the economic siege in the occupied territories over the first year of the Intifada was very severe. A few statistics serve as illustration. During that time 25,000 olive and fruit trees were uprooted, 42,000 dunums of land bulldozed (78% agricultural), 4000 buildings were completely destroyed of which 1,200 were houses, resulting in 1,500 families being left homeless.

Now, I will grant you that the "Palestinian" economy was even further hampered by the corruption and monopolization of the Palestinian Authority and the refusal of the other Muslim nations to use their vast oil wealth to give the Palestinians concrete economic aid instad of words and bombs, not that the Israelis have been above putting the clamps on aid and imports into the territories. These trends were tolerated or even encouraged by the few Arab donors funneling aid into the occupied territories, much of it into the executive branch of the P.A. And while a Palestinian living in Israel itself is likely better off than a Palestinian living in a camp in Jordan, he is also much better off than most Palestinians in the occupied territories.

So, the evidence argues strongly that Palestinian poverty and hoplessness is at least partially Israel's fault and that Israel has practiced economic warfare against the Palestinian population. It's not like "slacking" is just an option for lifestyle choice for these guys. Through its accession to the UN and its ratification of the "International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights", Israel has binding legal duties to respect, protect and fulfill the articles of the covenant for all the populations under its effective control. Economic policies of punishing a civilian population are violations of human rights law. Collective economic punishment of a civilian population is also forbidden under international law.

 

Fixed your post.

 

Of course, I will never accept terrorism against civilians.
I didn't think there was the need to point it out.

A suicide strike against military targets would be different, I don't think japanese kamikazes can be considered criminals.

And each nation have usually plenty of wellknown "heroes" that died in 'suicide' missions.

Hamas and Jihad strategies against civilians are sh1t, but let's be a bit honest.

There's the roadmap, there's bush, you see Mazen struggling to convince hamas to stop "fighting", you see that a negotiation anyway is going on between PLO and Hamas and you try to kill the leader of hamas (even failing and producing a disaster)?

Sadly this is not stupidity, this is conscious political strategic behaviour.

An this is not the first time.

p.s. About targeting civilians I avoid to talk about WW2 strategies.

 

Verily, you will burn for typing thus, Satan.

 

Proof that having something to live for will make even the most hard core terrorist question taking violent action:

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/12/hoffman.htm

 

Re: Re: Re: From the Deptartment Of Willfully Missing The Point:

I'm not arguing that poverty has nothing to do with terrorism, but I take issue with the idea that economics can explain the conflict. Or that economic policies can solve the conflict.

A couple of brief points.

If the USA had the birthrate of Palestinians, we'd have astronomical unemployment in no time. That's their main problem, economically.

Second, the 47% figure for Gazans working outside of Gaza. Please. There's no way Gaza could be viable. If Israelis kicked the Palestinians out of Gaza and 1 million moved there, the result would be similar. Egypt was thrilled to leave this problem for Israel.

Israeli settlements. The Israeli settlers, like Palestinians, seem to think 7-8 children is the norm. They're mostly growing naturally. You can argue all you want about construction patterns, but unless you kick the settlers out (like Sharon did in Sinai), there is no alternative.

"Also, Israel also used the pre-Oslo years to systematically confiscate Palestinian resources and land, much of which was used to settle Jews in the occupied territories, thus making it virtually impossible for any Palestinian national state to form in the West Bank and Gaza."

No one (virtually) entertained the possibility of a viable Palestinian state in just the West Bank and Gaza. Not the PLO. Not the Israelis. Your argument is the height of revisionism.