Some Background Facts & Opinions on the Illegal Blockade of Gaza

[Michael Tee]

<<Many specialised treatments, such as for complex heart surgery and certain types of cancer, are not available in Gaza and patients are referred for treatment to hospitals outside the territory. But many patients have had their applications for exit permits denied or delayed by Israeli authorities and have missed their appointments. Some have died while waiting for referral, the World Health Organisation said in a January statement.

<<. . . Other health problems include malnutrition, wasting and underweight children and anemia.

<<The lack of building materials is affecting essential health facilities: the new surgical wing in Gaza's main Shifa hospital has remained unfinished since 2006. Hospitals and primary care facilities, damaged during operation 'Cast Lead', have not been rebuilt because construction materials are not allowed into Gaza.

Thomson Reuters Foundation, Alert Net
http://www.alertnet.org/db/an_art/55076/2010/05/1-141115-1.htm


United Nations
<<On January 24, 2008, the United Nations Human Rights Council released a statement calling for Israel to lift its siege on the Gaza Strip, allow the continued supply of food, fuel, and medicine, and reopen border crossings.[59] According to the Jerusalem Post, this was the 15th time in less than two years the council condemned Israel for its human rights record regarding the Palestinian territories.[60] The proceedings were boycotted by Israel and the United States.

<<On December 15, 2008, following a statement in which he described the embargo on Gaza a crime against humanity, United Nations Special Rapporteur Richard A. Falk was prevented from entering the Palestinian territories by Israeli authorities and expelled from the region.[61] The Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Itzhak Levanon[62] said that the mandate of the Special Rapporteur was "hopelessly unbalanced," "redundant at best and malicious at worst." [63]

<<In August 2009, U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay criticised Israel for the blockade in a 34-page report, calling it a violation of the rules of war.[64]

<<In March 2010, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon stated that the blockade of Gaza is causing "unacceptable suffering" and that families were living in "unacceptable, unsustainable conditions".[65]

<<A UN Fact Finding mission lead by South African Judge Richard Goldstone suggested that the blockade was a war crime and possibly a crime against humanity:
"Israeli acts that deprive Palestinians in the Gaza Strip of their means of subsistence, employment, housing and water, that deny their freedom of movement and their right to leave and enter their own country, that limit their rights to access a court of law and an effective remedy, could lead a competent court to find that the crime of persecution, a crime against humanity, has been committed."[7] The Goldstone report recommended that the matter be referred to the International Criminal Court if the situation has not improved in six months.

<<In May 2010, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs stated that the formal economy in Gaza has collapsed since the imposition of the blockade.[66]>>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932010_blockade_of_the_Gaza_Strip#United_Nations

[sirs]

As Xo keeps opining, the Egyptian border is supposed to be wide open for both transit of "humanitarian" goods, and Palestinians free to transit in and out of their country.

Right?


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Oh, can someone please respond as well, so Tee can then be released from his self imposed dungeon, when it comes to sirs' responses.  Can't imagine how many times he's wanted to respond, then told himself....can't, can't, its that..... evil fascist moron sirs.  Must not respond, must not respond

[Christians4LessGvt]

<<Many specialised treatments, such as for complex heart surgery and certain types of cancer, are not available in Gaza and patients are referred for treatment to hospitals outside the territory. But many patients have had their applications for exit permits denied or delayed by Israeli authorities and have missed their appointments. Some have died while waiting for referral, the World Health Organisation said in a January statement.

Oh booo whooo can't make the doctor appointment because we shoot rockets at Israel....

Gaza rocket attack on Israel, Kibbutz Nirim March, 12, 2010

[Michael Tee]

<<Oh booo whooo can't make the doctor appointment because we shoot rockets at Israel....>>

A collective punishment cannot be imposed on a civilian population.  If the Israeli government has a beef with people shooting rockets at it, go after the rocket shooters.  Why condemn a sick man to death just because he's one of a million and a half Gazans and a few hundred of his fellow Gazans were shooting rockets at Israel, killing almost nobody in the process?

This is Israel's war on the sick and the helpless.  Too bad, as I can see, that you not only fail  to understand that, but that you can gleefully revel in the deaths of the unfortunate patients and joke about it as well.  Fortunately, it seems that most of the world, including the Secretary-General of the UN, can see the true horror behind your silly jokes.  The dying patients are probably not the young men firing rockets at Israel, but the Jews have chosen to inflict the punishment of death on them anyway, and enrage their grieving families in the process.  How is that going to help the Israelis in the long run, when they will now have hundreds more Palestinians who have good reason to seek revenge?  This kind of senseless brutality, further aggravated by the slaughter of the aid workers, is supposed to be GOOD for Israel?

I see, BTW, that the Egyptians have now decided to stop cooperating with Israel in the blockade and have opened their border with Gaza.  So the short-term result of the Israeli massacre is to end the blockade of Gaza.  That's just the beginning.  Those bastards will get what they deserve.

[sirs]

 

[Christians4LessGvt]

yeah sure Michael the Allies should not have bombed Berlin because it wasn't really the women
and children of Berlin we were at war with in those buildings...it was Hitler....so shame shame
shame on the Alllies for bombing Berlin and winning WWII!

[Michael Tee]

Slight difference there, CU4.  The women and children of Berlin were the wives, mothers, children and family of the monsters that ravaged Europe and committed the racist murder of six million Jews as well as millions of others, gypsies (Roma,) Poles, Russians, etc.  Given the monstrosity of the crimes, the entire nation had to pay for them.  It's not as if the guilty Nazis were lining up and volunteering for punishment, "Here, take me, I'm the bad guy who ran the gas chamber at Treblinka."  The revenge was like the revenge of God, it fell on the entire nation, because their crime was so monstrous and the actually guilty just blended into the population.  Just like they killed the innocent Jews just for being Jewish, so their "innocent" civilians also had to die, just for being German.  Besides which most of those Nazi bitches idolized and worshiped Adolf Hitler and supported everything he did - - you can see it in the old newsreels of Hitler visiting cities and towns in Germany, his car is always swarmed by ecstatic, swooning women, little girls throwing flowers at him, etc.  They are truly spawn of the devil, and the only way to remove them from the face of the earth was the way that was used - - high explosive, and lots of it.

In Gaza, what is the crime of the militants?  Firing rockets at those who stole their land from them?  Fuck them, if they stole my land and pushed me into a refugee camp, I would fire rockets at them too.  There is no reason to punish an entire civilian population for the war-like acts of a justly angered people.  Your comparison is just sloppy thinking.  Nobody in history has committed a crime similar to the Holocaust, and nobody from the guilty nation could have been spared from the retribution that had to follow.  The Palestinians in particular have done nothing more heinous than offer armed resistance to an armed occupation - - who the hell would not?

[Amianthus]

Slight difference there, CU4.  The women and children of Berlin were the wives, mothers, children and family of the (Nazis)

The women and children in Gaza are also the wives, mothers, children and family of those shooting the rockets.

[Michael Tee]

I can understand those rocketeers.  What I will never be able to understand is the Holocaust.  

[Amianthus]

I can understand those rocketeers.  What I will never be able to understand is the Holocaust.  

The "rocketeers" have pretty much the same viewpoint as those who committed the Holocaust: kill Jews.

[Michael Tee]

<<The "rocketeers" have pretty much the same viewpoint as those who committed the Holocaust: kill Jews.>>

Bullshit.  The rocketeers have only one objective in mind:  drive the occupiers off their lands.  If that means killing Jews, so be it.  The true aggressors are the Jews who stole their lands.

The Nazi "kill the Jews" was a primary objective, a goal in and of itself, not linked to a prior crime that the Jews had committed against them.  It was based on bogus racial theory and bogus history.  Every single one of their victims was innocent.  The Israelis can't claim any such innocence for themselves.

[sirs]

<<The "rocketeers" have pretty much the same viewpoint as those who committed the Holocaust: kill Jews.>>

Bullshit.  The rocketeers have only one objective in mind:  drive the occupiers off their lands.  If that means killing Jews, so be it.  The true aggressors are the Jews who stole their lands.

Not to be confused with the aggressors that tried driving the Jews out of the land in the late 40's & 60's, with the Jews taking the spoils of land as their victory in defending themselves.  Can't be letting those facts get in the way of a good Anti-semetic rant

Notice also how Tee still hasn't been able to debunk that the only "expansion" of area that Israel is taking, is that that they already have, and not some asanine attempt to "take over all of the Middle East".  But at least its nice to see his concession that killing Jews is perfectly acceptable

[BSB]

MT...A collective punishment cannot be imposed....


Ah huh. And what about your claim that the people who were killed at the WTC weren't so innocent? Or your claim that America, meaning every American, deserves it regarding another major terrorist attack?

[Michael Tee]

<<And what about your claim that the people who were killed at the WTC weren't so innocent? >>

They never gave a thought to America's victims.  Their tax dollars paid for a lot of killing, a lot of torture.  The real question is why don't i care as passionately about what happened to them as I do about what happens to the Palestinians or the aid workers.  I guess in the case of the Palestinians, I see the wretched of the earth.  The people who have had to live under the hell of a military occupation and then a blockade for over 40 years.  In poverty and wretchedness and injustice.  Where the sick aren't allowed out for treatment, where thousands die under the bombs and shells of the Israeli military, where the hospitals are bombed and not allowed to be rebuilt and most of the children grow up malnourished.  From these people arise bombers and rocketeers.  Do I blame them?  No.  Not at all.  Should the civilian population be punished for this?  Both international law and my own heart say no.

The victims of the WTC may be technically innocent of the actual crimes and atrocities of their government.  But they are hardly the wretched of the earth and the government which they support at least with their tax dollars has gone out and committed or supported acts of huge injustice that generate wrath on an enormous scale against the government and the people of the USA.  Most of them probably support the troops and the war effort, so they are sympathetic to the carnage wreaked by America on the Arab world.  They supported massive aid subsidies to Israel for decades while the Israelis violently abused the human rights of the Palestinians and robbed them of pieces of their land on a daily basis.  Bombed their homes, bulldozed their crops and murdered their children time after time on the American dime.  How can I feel much sorrow or sympathy for folks like these when their chickens finally come home to roost?

<<Or your claim that America, meaning every American, deserves it regarding another major terrorist attack? >>

Technically, they (as individuals) probably DON'T deserve it, but how can I feel sorry for them when what they are really suffering is payback from the innocent victims of American aggression?

The bottom line is that nobody deserves to be in a collective punishment, but when it happens, I can feel indignation for the victims of the collective punishment when they have done nothing really wrong and the actions for which they are being punished are not heinous crimes without rational explanation or excuse.  OTOH, when the victims of the collective punishment are receiving payback from some grievously injured parties (like the Muslim victims of American and Israeli aggression) then, deserved or not, I can't muster up a whole lot of sympathy for them.  I'm more consumed with sympathy for America's victims, who were truly undeserving, than I am with the victims of their payback,  innocent though they may be.

 Karma, I guess.  The Americans are reaping the bad karma from the actions of their government, to which they in their own small way contributed (as tax-paying citizens with full civic rights in a nominal democracy.)  The Gazans are being punished for the actions of their militants, which are in no way as heinous as the gratuitous and unprovoked violence that the Americans inflict on their Third World victims, either directly or through their Israeli proxies.

[BSB]

Your applied emotional spectrum is so limited that it's impossible to converse with you. You either chose not to, or are unable, to put into play the human commonalities that make the give and take of a rewarding discourse possible. I honestly don't know if it's an act, or if it's just you. It's probably both to one degree or another. Too bad.