Recent Events in Iraq

The turtles did turn turtle. 😀

Or what is worse – AH-1s, AH-64s, F-16s, Merkava MBTs etc.

Yeah – but they are a little obvious if someone is trying to assasinate you; a bulldozer, on the other hand, is an everyday tool that someone in authority can claim just went out of control whikst trying to build a road/find a tunnel/avoid a child that ran out in front of it and ran over a whole row of Palestinian houses/villages/zoos and that they are terribly sorry, it won’t happen again today, and will those turtles be alright?

Flood.™

Only if being buried under the rubble doesn’t kill them – Nermal

so you sit there, in your house, knowing that bulldozer + house = rubble…

But you know that they won’t become suicide bombers after a visit from those nice young men and their bulldozers;) – Nermal

Best thing about those bulldozers is that they take suspense to a new level. A curfew means that you can’t leave your house… so you sit there, in your house, knowing that bulldozer + house = rubble…

Hey – I cannot take to having to avoid bulldozers for the rest of my life…;)

Flood.™

Your sense of irony intrigues me…

Well, you know that we are all going to be damned as Palestinian-lovers so I am just playing devils advocate.;)

Flood.™

Sometimes, when things get too sad to cry about, laughing is all that’s left. Being raised on Disney-films like just about anybody else under 70 these days, there’s nothing as shocking as seeing pictures of flattened turtles.

Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo… to the rescue! Avenge your brethren!

I can’t believe that you/we are all doing this. How can we besmirch Israel in this way; it is obvious that the Israeli authorities are doing this for the good of the Palestinians and anyone who cannot see this is a fool. We should all understand that whilst they are having their homes destroyed the nasty evil anti-Zionist vermin scum will not have time to plan the attacks that are their means of apparent retaliation.
I am pleased that the peacock was saved, but am a bit worried that the wolves may have not escaped when the bulldozer driver failed to observe the stop signs…

Flood.™

On the other hand, those turtles and ostriches won’t live to become terrorists!

What the Israeli gov’t has been doing the past few weeks is just pure terrorism. Destroying homes because there might be tunnels under it. I’m glad many Israelian expressed their outrage towards the gov’t through protests.

anybody cares to comment? :rolleyes: :

http://albawaba.com/news/index.php3?sid=277373&lang=e&dir=news

Israeli Justice Minister compares Rafah raid to Nazi actions
23-05-2004, 11:55

An Israeli Cabinet minister on Sunday said the military’s demolition of Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip reminded
him of actions the Nazis took against his family during World War II and called for a halt to the policy of destroying homes.

The remarks by Justice Minister Yosef Lapid, a Holocaust
survivor, sparked an uproar at the weekly Cabinet meeting,
according to officials at the meeting.

The ministers were discussing Israel’s demolition of homes
in the Rafah refugee camp. Dozens of homes have been
destroyed or damaged during an ongoing offensive along the
Gaza-Egypt border.

Lapid was quoted by officials at the meeting as saying a
picture of an old Palestinian woman on the rubbles of her
home reminded him “of my grandmother in the Holocaust.”

The statement outraged Likud Party ministers, who demanded he recant.

For his part, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said such comments add “oil to the fire of incitement.” Lapid said he was not comparing Israel to the Nazis but there “is no forgiveness for people who treat an old woman in this way.” (Albawaba.com)

______________________

may be I’m not the only one comparing those acts after all.

What chance that these are the only two WMDs Saddam had left in all Iraq, when his scientists have admitted to the Iraq Survey Group of investigators that they’ve been working on such weapons research for years?

Didn’t that guy who has recently lost his popularity with the American government (and whose name I can’t remember) actually supply several scientists to the Americans – helping to get them out of the country before the war, etc?
Maybe I am being ignorent but if someone who wants to be the new golden boy supplied me with people who tell me exactly what I want to hear then I might be heavily inclined to smile benevolently upon him…
The teams searching for weapons before the war came to the conclusion that there was no active programme currently running; were the Americans conned into believing that there were still WMDs ready for use by the man who wanted to be king?

Flood.™

So, let me get this straight: since everyone basically arrived at one time or another, without the importance of precedence, then neither have claims stronger than any other, right?

As far as I am concerned if you have NZ citizenship then you have as many rights as any other NZ citizen. If it was “who was here first” then both Maori and those who arrived after them should leave as the few hundred Moriori who were actually here first should own the place.

Yet at the same time I do not deny a similiar Palestinian right, just like Jews the Palestinians are also descendants of various waves of immigration to this land, in recent as well as ancient times. The very name Palestine, the name the Roman gave this land when they expelled the Jews and set to erase any trace of Jewish independence, is from the Philistines, which were Greek seafolk which settled on the Mediterranean coast.

Yet you never come on this board complaining that the Israelis won’t give the Palestinians real autonomy, airports, sea ports, their own state… a chance to rule themselves. You just complain when others suggest that the Israelis are a bit heavy handed here or there that it is all the Palestinians fault for this, that or another reason.

Considering two groups are basically occupying the same piece of land I would have thought a shared government that involved shared land and resources would make more sense.

Jewish nationhood in Palestine is a historical fact, you don’t have to be religious to understand this.

You seem to be confusing presence with nationhood. The fact that there are a lot of Chinese people in New Zealand (ashamed to say they were tricked into coming here a hundred years or more ago to work the gold mines and were not treated well.. 🙁 ) does not mean they can claim a chinese nation here any more so than a scot or a brit could do the same. This country is New Zealand, not Britain, or Scotland, or China or France.

You claim it to be fact that there were Jewish people in Palestine 1 or 2 thousand years ago but they were forced out. How do you know they weren’t forced out by people who had been there even longer? The simple fact is that we don’t know. To claim that you had your land (your land mind you) stolen one or two thousand years ago and that you are just claiming it back is amusing and farcical. You are fighting a war against yourself… these palestinians are only doing what your ancestors probably did too and they have just as much right to do what they are doing as you did… in 1,000 years perhaps they will take “their” land back and your descendants can be the hated religious zealots that want to irradicate a people… or victims which ever way you see the current situation.

Even if you ignore all the overwhelming archeological evidence, you can simply take a trip down to Rome’s Titus Arch and see the story of the plundering of the Kingdom of Judea on the walls or read the works of Flavius Josephus which detail Jewish life and revolts against Roman rule.

So the Palestinians are the Romans? What sort of Jewish state did you have if the Romans ruled you? Why dont’ you ask the Italians back to rule you again if you want to return to what you had?

It quite amazing to see that at a time that the Israeli government is trying to push forward a plan to evacuate both Israeli troops and Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip, you’re actually accusing us of trying to get rid of them!

It is the same old story though. One extremist that doesn’t want peace to progress will do something very stupid and both sides will use it to escalate with a retaliation and then the peace progress will stop again. Besides giving someone who thinks you stole their coat back a pocket lining is hardly going to make much difference.

You mention Christians, yet how many Christian nations are there? How many Muslim countries?

How many christian nations should there be? Most White western nations are christian… try marrying more than one woman in the US or New Zealand or Australia, or Britain…

For economic reasons, I guess. Yet you would claim to be more justified that me?

To make a better life for their families with a bit of land to call their own. Not to take it from someone else. Before you start bleating on about how they stole the land from the Maori I live in the South Island… the vast majority of Maori lived and still live in the North Island. Our race relations are not perfect and there are still problems but there are fewer race problems in the South than in the North… and certainly nothing like US southern states a few decades ago.

Within living memory we were slaughtered by the millions. You may have forgotten history, I have not.

The Slavs were killed in rather greater numbers during that one period of history you keep bringing up.

Spare me the preaching, for 19 centuries in exile we were plainly not good enough for Europe or anyone else, we certainly were not “your” people, hard as we tried.

You never fitted in because you never tried. Perhaps if you stopped pining for a jewish state that never existed as a state and tried to just get along with everyone you might have been better off.

He is their tragedy, and they will be the first to benefit from his demise.

You sound like Bush telling the Iraqis who will rule them… I don’t think the Iraqis agree with Bush either.

Arafat would not compromise an inch on territory, on the Holy Places and on the refugees, whose presumptive rights were fundamentally incompatible both with the two-state solution and with the survival Israel.

He refuses or you refuse?

The US Army also revealed it two weeks earlier found a shell of mustard gas, another of Saddam’s banned weapons

And how about the 500 + shells the US army left on a pacific Island that were recently unearthed and removed? Have these weapons been included in declarations of WMDs holdings by the US? A WMD agreements violator!!!!! burn them at the stake!!!!

who has them

That is a very good question, and that’s what really scares me.

Hussein had the weapons, and I think anyone who thinks he didn’t is kidding themselves. They might not like the war, but to say that the man never had the weapons is just ridiculous. Time will likely prove that more of them are in existence.

Of course, he had all the time in the world to hide them. He threw the inspectors out for crying out loud! Is that not a “dinner bell” right there??

I think some people are so enraged that the United States and England would have the audacity to do something as awful as get rid of a horrible dictator that they don’t want to believe Hussein ever had the weapons at all.

As far as other countries they might be I wouldn’t be shocked if some of the weapons were/are in Syria….of course that’s likely not the only place.

THE LOGIC is much the same, of course. If the brutality of a few American soldiers proves the whole US army is evil, then surely the finding of two weapons of mass destruction means Saddam Hussein did still have those stocks of WMD we’ve been looking for, after all.
This week came news that US troops found a shell filled with about three litres of sarin, one drop of which is fatal. Luckily the shell, rigged up as a roadside bomb by terrorists, had not detonated properly, so the chemicals meant to combine in the shell’s flight to create sarin failed to mix properly.
The US Army also revealed it two weeks earlier found a shell of mustard gas, another of Saddam’s banned weapons.
What chance that these are the only two WMDs Saddam had left in all Iraq, when his scientists have admitted to the Iraq Survey Group of investigators that they’ve been working on such weapons research for years? The real worry now is: Where are the rest, and who has them?

That Nick Burg was the most horrible thing I have ever seen. They should carpet bomb those rotton no goods

That Nick Burg was the most horrible thing I have ever seen. They should carpet bomb those rotton no goods

That Nick Burg was the most horrible thing I have ever seen. They should carpet bomb those rotton no goods

Of course that’s a bad thing. But if they were treated equally bad as the non-Jewish population (apart from the Iraqi Jews there were/are also a number of pretty large Christian groups in Iraq), then the whole point of Jews being maltreated just because they were Jewish is invalid. I’m not too well informed in the subject, but Jews in Morocco used to be pretty well settled in society there well into the 1960s.