I got the following toon passed on to me in an email this morning. Judging from the amount of FWDs in the subject, I assume this has been passed around as much as Clara, who is Mariano Rivera's wife. The email simply shows the toon with the caption "pass it on" sprinkled at the bottom. Here it is:
The implication, for those too tired or lazy to think, is that Israel does what it does to protect its children, whereas the Palestinians of Gaza do what they do by harming as many children as possible. While I find this portrayal to be a grossly underestimated summary of whats going on over there, I can't help but see that there exists some truth to the matter.
Israel could eliminate Hamas by bombing Gaza back to the stone ages....err, further back into the stone ages. Israel does put their own at risk in an attempt to save civilian lives, which is horribly difficult to do when rockets are being fired from civilian packed apartment dwellings and hospitals.
Does this justify Israel's "out of whack" death count? In a way, it does. Remember, Israel is still a mostly secular state. More importantly, the Israeli government, being democratically elected, reflects this reality. Anyone who says this is a war of relgion is missing the entire point. This is, at its core, a dispute about land, but now I am off point...
Hamas is able to successfully sell religious extremism because the people of Gaza have nothing else left to buy. Whats left for a broken people to long for? So Hamas does not mind killing the young in the same way those that enlist child solders in Sri Lanka and Uganda care more about there cause then their young.
I have always felt that a unwavering belief in eternal salvation reduces the experience of life to time spent in a waiting room. What is a government supposed to do when a group like that is firing rockets, day in and day out, into your people's living room?
So, where am I going with all of this? Maybe nowhere, but isn't that the point? I am writing about Israel/Palestine after all, and is there really anything left to write about it that's both coherent and honest?
3 comments:
The cartoon does leave out the Palestinian children that are killed by Israeli bombs.
Fuck Hamas, fuck Israel, fuck the US. Go Cavs.
Lay off Mo's wife ya dick. Sheesh!
Uhm, Israel is *NOT* a secular state. It is written into the ISRAELI CONSTITUTION that Israel is a *JEWISH* state. The ultra-orthodox black robes rule large sections of the national life, behaving in ways that would make Iranian ayatollahs proud. Go read Haaretz about incidents where ultra-orthodox attack women who "dress wrong" or attack Arab-owned shops that attempt to open on the Jewish Sabbath if you doubt me. Oh yeah, I forget, Haaretz is "self-hating Jews". Sigh.
As for the picture, what you have there is what's called a *HOSTAGE SITUATION*. Now, here in civilization, we don't shoot the hostage to get at the criminal behind the hostage. We bring in more guns and surround the criminal and make it clear he's going nowhere and that if he harms the hostage he's going down, we try to get a sniper shot on the criminal, we *negotiate* with the criminal to see if we can get him to give up peacefully, and so forth. But we don't just shoot the hostage. Israel, on the other hand, seems to have no such qualms...
- Badtux the Procedural Penguin
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