IDF troops arrest 87 senior Hamas political and military officials

Newzjunkey, you've been reading and absorbing too much junky news.

A Hamas official called the arrests an "open war against the Palestinian government and people,"

I'm confused. I thought that was what Hamas wanted.

Unconscionable? Let's talk about how these two groups of individuals died, shall we?

WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?

Nylon is too expensive. I suggest HANO.

That's a 4:1 ratio. It's unconscionable.

And how many of each total were belligerents?

How many of each total were innocents?

How many of the innocents were targeted deliberately, and how many were collateral deaths?

Put those factors onto the scales of your conscience, and then get back to me.

By Steven Plaut

Quick, take a fast current events quiz:

1. Since the start of the Palestinian "intifada", how many innocent
Palestinian civilians have been intentionally murdered by Israel?

2. Since the start of the Palestinian "intifada", how many innocent
Israeli civilians have been intentionally murdered by the PLO, the Hamas,
and their affiliates?

Now if you have been relying on the mainstream media, you will be forgiven
for not knowing the correct answers to those two questions. The correct
answer to the first question is "zero", and the correct answer to the
second question is "All of them!"

That's right. Not a single innocent Palestinian has been intentionally
killed by Israel during the past two decades of "intifada" violence. But
every single one of the hundreds of Jewish civilians killed was an
intentional act of Palestinian murder.

Sure, plenty of guilty Palestinians have been killed, and these include
murderers, leaders in terror organizations, rank and file terrorists, and
people setting up rocket launchers to fire at Jewish civilians. And sure,
there have also been innocent Palestinian civilians who were killed or
injured when the Jews shot back. These are people who were killed in the
same Israeli anti-terror operations necessitated by Palestinian terrorist
aggression and atrocities.

There is a fundamental difference, however, between Palestinian civilians
getting killed in anti-terror operations and reprisals by Israel and
Israeli civilians, who are killed by Palestinian Islamofascists. The
Palestinian dead are unintended collateral damage from operations aimed at
stopping rocket attacks and other terrorist attacks against Israeli
civilians. True, Israeli anti-terror operations are not so "surgically
exact" that only guilty terrorists get killed in them. I am quite sure
that if and when such a precise military technology is invented, for
killing only guilty terrorists when they hide among innocent civilians,
Israel will be the first country on earth to adopt it. However, until
then, when Palestinians intentionally target and murder Jewish civilians,
innocent Palestinian civilians may suffer the consequences of Arab terror.

Jewish civilians are ALWAYS the target of Palestinian terror. Israeli
soldiers hurt by the terrorists are generally the unintended collateral
damages.

Israel suffers from a fundamental strategic problem, which damages its
ability to defend itself, namely, the fact that modern Hebrew does not
have a linguistic equivalent to the American slang expression "Tough!"
True, it has some words for "What a Shame," but they do not quite convey
the same meaning. As a result, Israeli politicians generally fail to
respond to whines from the world about Palestinian civilians getting hurt
in counter-terror operations by saying, "Tough!"

There has never been a war in which only soldiers get killed, and there
does not exist a weapons technology that allows military strikes to take
place in an exact manner where no civilians near military targets ever get
hurt. Such surgical precision is all the more impossible when terrorists
intentionally hide within and behind civilian populations. International
law recognizes the rights of countries at war to attack terrorists and
even soldiers when they are hiding among civilians, even when such attacks
produce civilian deaths. International law assigns blame for those deaths
on the belligerents who use the civilians as their "human shields". As
well it should.

When German civilians were killed in massive allied bombing of Germany in
World War II, when schools with German children were blown to bits, the
American command did not send out forensics crews to examine whether the
shell or bomb had really come from an American plane or perhaps from
something else. The Allied command just said "Tough!". Nazi Germany had
started the war, engaged in barbarous aggression and genocide, and Germany
. including its civilians . would have to bear the consequences. Don't
like German children being targeted? Then don.t start a world war.

Ditto for Japanese civilians killed in World War II. Let us keep in mind
that far more innocent Japanese civilians died in the conventional bombing
of Tokyo than in the two nuclear explosions. Bombing Tokyo was necessary
to end the war. (Actually, so was bombing Hiroshima.) Civilians died
as a result? Tough!

When Palestinians on a Gaza beach are killed by an Israeli shell (if that
is what really happened, and there are reasons to doubt it), then the
moral responsibility for those deaths rests squarely on the shoulders of
the Palestinian terrorists who necessitate Israeli return fire. These are
the same terrorists who have fired thousands of rockets and mortar shells
into Israeli civilian areas, even after Israel completely withdrew from
the Gaza Strip. These are the murdering Islamofascists who have turned
the Negev town of Sderot, well inside Israel's pre-1967 borders, into the
Israeli equivalent of Guernica, under daily bombardment. Sderot's
low-income civilians live in bunkers, afraid for their lives.

Don't want Palestinian civilians killed when Israel shoots back? Simple.
Stop the rocket attacks on Sderot.

Don't like Israeli reprisals? Simple. Stop the terror atrocities
committed by Palestinians against Jews.

You want Palestinians to move about freely without being searched at
checkpoints? Simple. Stop the campaign of bombings, suicide mass
murders, and atrocities by the Palestinians. When the Palestinians stop
murdering Jews, no one will have to check their cars. When Palestinian
ambulances no longer carry explosives and murderers, no one will stop them
for inspection.

You want the Palestinians to earn decent wages, have a comfortable life?
Simple. Suppress Palestinian terrorism. Stop Palestinian rocket
aggression. Then they can even hold day jobs in Israel if they want.
They are welcome to shop in Israel and get Israeli medical treatment. No
problem!

But as long as the terror continues, don't expect Israel to respond by
turning the other cheek and abandoning self-defense. Don't like it?
TOUGH! When suicide bombers blow up Israeli buses and cafes, military
strikes at the perps will continue and Palestinian civilians may well die.
Tough! You don't want innocent Palestinian civilians to have to die?
Stop the mass atrocities against Jewish children and other living things!
Don't like civilians getting hurt in wars? Then don't start wars of terror
and aggression against Israel.

The Bash-Israel lobby keeps coming up with new forms of political
aggression against the Jewish state. The newest goes something like this.
Until Israel is technologically capable of killing terrorists hiding in
the middle of cities full of civilians without a single Palestinian
civilian being injured as "collateral damage", then Israel should be
coerced into adopting a policy of Quaker pacifism, under which it does not
respond or retaliate at all to terror atrocities.

In other words, by demanding that Israel only implement 100% pure military
tactics that no other army on earth has ever adopted, the Bash-Israel
lobby is in effect really insisting that Israel stop defending its own
civilians altogether. Israel should just respond to the firing of
thousands of rockets at its civilians by turning the other cheek, becoming
the first nation on earth to adopt such pacifism as its military strategy.
Israel must be disarmed, while the terrorism must be rewarded. And if
Israel dares to shoot back, it becomes the aggressor. By the same logic,
Britain and the US were the real aggressors against Germany in 1944.

Such disingenuous demands for utopian purity in military operations, even
when they come from Israel's own Leftists, are little more than a demand
for unconditional Israeli capitulation to terror. Indeed, the only
permissible defensive strategy such people are willing to allow Israel to
follow is such capitulation.

Let us stop with the rhetorical pretenses and affectations! People who
are "only" outraged when Palestinian civilians are unintentionally hurt by
Israel, but have nothing to say against the mass rocket attacks on Sderot,
are naked anti-Semites. They consider Jewish children legitimate targets
of Arab aggression and Islamofascist terror because they hate Jews. In
reality, they do not care a fig about Palestinian civilian casualties.
Such causalities are such delightful propaganda tools that can be
exploited to demonize the Jews.

There is only one effective way to prevent Palestinian civilian
casualties, and that is to stop the Palestinian terrorist aggression
against Israel. But that is the one solution to the problem that these
modern day pogromchiki, including the academic brownshirts, will never
allow to be implemented.

Only if we can set Gitmo up properly. The man running it needs to be a hog farmer.....

No there is pattern here. Examples of this anti-semite's posts:

" IF true, they got the perps for this murder. None of it justifies IDF's other actions."

"More bad news if this claim turns out to be genuine. Israel's policy of boots-on-the-necks-of-Palestine has been a failure for decades. Their solution is more of the same."

"This activity by Israel is very troubling."

"Oh, I forgot to point out that Hamas is the legally *elected* gov't of the Palestinians. Where's the problem of Syria helping?"

This guy's a beaut...

Thanks Croak, that's a keeper.

dung.

If the Israelis were serious about ending this madness, that ratio would be closer to 100:1.

To hell with palestine. To hell with islam.

I just checked those posts too. I guess in the War on Terror, he's on the side of those who cheered Osama on 9-11. I guess he also finds it unconscionable that more Al Queda/Taliban have been killed than Americans over the past five years. Sickening.

The logic, or lack thereof, escapes me...

The soldier is dead. His body was found.

Good Job!

Militants from Hamas, the "democratically" elected Palestinian government, took months to build a tunnel to sneak across a recognized border to kill and kidnap Israeli soldiers. I'd say that is an act of war by the Palestinian government and Israel is justified in arresting, if not killing, these Hamas goverment officials.

"Too bad Israel revoked the death penalty."

How can it be called the death penalty when you send a puke to 72 virgins?

I thought the body was of an Israeli teenager who was abducted and murdered, not the soldier (yet).

Sorry strongly disagree. Hamas is Israil's Al-Qaeda.

Israel donsn't give two craps what the world thinks right now. They should shoot these bastards never mind arrest them .Israel knows just what it's doing . Notice how American troops were kidnapped a few weeks ago and tourtured and mutilated and it's already old news and no one cares. We should learn fron Israel how to take care of business. Hamas is a collection of thugs .