Bloody fucking Guardian anti-Semitic Commies

Fisking the Guardian

Let’s take a look at the good sense for which the Guardian is world famous.

Israel has left the peace process in ruins

In a personal view, Tom Baker in Jerusalem argues that the assault on Gaza is politically motivated and will only strengthen Hamas. Last Updated: 8:13AM GMT 31 Dec 2008

As he prepares to enter the White House next month, Barack Obama does not have his troubles to seek. He will, for example, have to tackle one of the greatest wobbles in capitalism’s history. Then there are the millions of Americans being thrown out of work and their repossessed homes, who will look to him for a helping hand. And we must not forget the backwash from George W Bush’s foreign policy blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Would those blunders include waiting many months for the international community to okay America’s already legal attack on ceasefire-breaking Iraq and also not installing permanent puppet regimes in each country as... well, pretty much any non-democratic country would do (which is all the countries in the Middle East, except for Israel and Iraq of 2009)?

But in the run-up to Christmas, the President-elect could at least put one major foreign policy issue in a BlackBerry subdirectory marked “Doing OK” – the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“Doing OK” meaning the existence of an incurably anti-Semitic Islamist theocracy bombarding Israel on a nearly-daily basis for 6 years, right?

After decades of turmoil, violence and disagreement, the celestial bodies of international relations had shifted into rare alignment. Israel and a moderate Palestinian leadership under Fatah’s current chairman, Mahmoud Abbas…

‘Moderate’ here meaning on whose party deploys female suicide bombers and which bombed Israel as recently as 2007 and may be actively sabotaging the present peace process(hereafter referred to as PP).

were actually prepared to sit down and forge two new countries: Israel, without much of the land it occupied in 1967..

why did it occupy that land in 1967, Tom? Out of the blue was it? Just plain Jewish meanness?

…and a state called Palestine. Of course, the talks were never going to be easy, but the fact that they would be held at all represented a massive step forward.

…from the entire Arab world and most of the Islamic world’s utter refusal to accept the existence of a Jewish state of Israel that had existed throughout its whole previous existence. And on this fertile soil, Tom, you and ‘the celestial bodies of international relations’ were planning to base a peace process, right?

All that changed on Saturday when Israel launched Operation Cast Lead...

Right out of the blue , huh, Tom?

This is a list of Qassam rockets attacks which occur in 2008. According to the Israeli military's count on December 27th, 3,000 rockets hit Israel since the beginning of the year.

The name refers to a lead spinning top played with by children during the Jewish winter festival of Hannukah, but there was nothing playful about the military assault.

…Unlike the childlike innocence of Hamas’ culture, right?

In a co-ordinated strike just before noon, 64 Israeli combat aircraft dropped 108 laser-guided munitions within a few minutes of each other on 40 targets the length of the Gaza Strip. A second wave of attack helicopters and ground-attack aircraft stood off, waiting to hit militants as they hurried to retaliate by firing rockets into Israel.

So if that was retaliation against Israel’s recent bombing, what were all these rocket attacks in retaliation against? Except against the very existence of Israel, of course?

One Israeli source claimed 50 “rocket pits’’ were hit in this second wave. The reason given for the assault was to end the firing of mortars and rockets into Israel by militants in Gaza: as Gaza is run by Hamas, the group could be held responsible for all rockets, even if many were fired by militants from rival groups such as Islamic Jihad.

This was not a strike solely against the infrastructure of Hamas. If that had been the case the attacks would have taken place at night, like the opening salvoes of Nato’s Kosovo air campaign in 1999 or the US-led assault on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003.

Operation Cast Lead was intended to kill as many Hamas members as possible, which is why it was ordered in the middle of a working day.

…Well, if you lived under the delusion, brought upon you by years of experience and listening to what people actually say, that Hamas wishes to destroy Israel, you might want to thin Hamas’ numbers a bit, as well as bombing their materiel. Don’t you think?

To some extent it was a success: scores, perhaps hundreds, of Hamas members were killed in that first wave. It is impossible to be exact about the number of fatalities, because Israel sought to control the narrative of the air assault by preventing foreign journalists from reaching Gaza.

…so all the pictures and interviews and film we see repeated endlessly from Gaza must be Hamas-approved, right? Interesting. I wonder who edits the output, and how, and why? But I agree about the lack of freedom of journalists here- it does fall short of the Free World’s high standards. One remembers The Times interviews of Berlin residents under RAF and USAAF bombardment in 1944, and how German newspapers questioned Colin Harris and Winston Churchill at length about the effects of the Blitz, yeah?

And all this after the bang-up job the world’s press made of covering the Lebanon war when visiting journalists had their passports confiscated by Hezbollah and were guided to newsworthy sites by Hezbollah operatives?

I know from experience that unless you actually look into the dented, gore-stained trays of Gaza’s many mortuaries you cannot be certain about the number and identity of locals killed in fighting.

…and you can be certain then, right? All the uniformed men they bring in are secretly civilians, yeah, and all the civvy-clad men; they aren’t off-duty Hamas ‘fighters’ who’ve left their uniforms back at home for the day?

I mean, it’s not like anyone’s denying that civilians, especially women and children, are stationed right next to Hamas weapons platforms and supply, not to say their command and control and political leadership. There must be some – will certainly be some – as it’s a deliberate policy of Islamists to target or to get their enemies to target, places full of civilians so certain people in the West can then attack the defenders of the West. Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran – you get population centres, you get civilians.

And Mumbai, of course, and the World Trade Centre, and the London Underground.

All those heavily-fortified, clearly marked and physically separated military targets…

With Hamas on the back foot, Israel kept up the pace of attacks by pounding targets connected to the militant group, no matter how indirect that connection. As the onslaught moved into its third day the target list was extended to include symbols of Hamas rule, such as the private house of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader and former Palestinian prime minister. Haniyeh went to ground long ago and his house was empty, but its status as a symbol meant the Israeli air force went after it.

…Wow, those vicious Israelis bombing uninhabited buildings? The bastards. And the very thought of using symbolic acts in warfare – that’s a no-no, right? No-one ever does that, unless you read about this or this or this.

Notwithstanding the growing number of Palestinian civilians killed in the operation, my first response on Saturday when I heard about the attacks was that the consequence would be to increase, not reduce, the number of Israelis killed by rockets.

…Yep, the journalist’s infallible nose for a story once again trumps the superstitious miscalculations of a bunch of mere Israeli military leaders. What’s it like to be so right, Tom?

Palestinian militants in Gaza are so numerous and their stock of rockets so large that a massive, retaliatory barrage could be expected. By nightfall on the first day one Israeli had been killed. As of today, that death toll stands at four.

You were right. A 400% increase. You know, the rest of Israel, and indeed humanity, must be cursing the silly old bereaved family of that first Israeli casualty for all the calamity he has brought upon the world.

This represents a significant surge in Israeli casualties. Before Op Cast Lead, 14 Israelis had been killed in four years of intermittent rocket firing from Gaza.

…And those 14 don’t matter at all because…?

But the most intriguing thing about Op Cast Lead is its timing. Why send in the bombers in December 2008, when rockets have been landing in Israel for eight years?

Wow, eight whole years? They must be used to it by now. What sane person would dream of counter-attacking, ever, and threatening the PP now that Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas are in charge of ‘Palestine?’

It had been six months since the last Israeli fatality. What led the Israeli military-political elite to choose this month to order a sustained attack?

Any intelligence estimates that, for example, Hamas’ military forces are increasing in strength and numbers and the sophistication of their weaponry should be ignored, then, until the Gazan Arabs stand wall-to-wall and armed to the teeth and ready to push the PP onto its next stage?

The answer is quite simple. Israelis go to the polls in February and it is this that is driving this operation. The ruling Kadima party — until recently led by Ehud Olmert, who was forced to stand down over a series of corruption scandals — had been created back in 2005 to break the mould of Israeli politics by standing on a centrist, moderate ticket. No longer would Israeli politics swing between the extremes of the Left wing Labour party and the Right-wing Likud.

…That’s a given, of course. Moderation will always win out if left to its own, over ‘extremists’. That’s what happened in the Gazan elections, of course, and the Irish EU referendum, and the 1933 German elections, and all the other places where the liberals of the world back moderation.

‘Extremists’, by the way, is shorthand for ‘Right-wing extremists’ – there is no equivalent word for Islamist Moslems in most liberal discourse, because ‘militants’ is reserved for suicide-bombers and the machine-gunners of crowds , rocketeers who flip home-made ‘devices’ into Israel, and other artists formerly known as ‘terrorists.’

But centrism is a risky business in a polity as radicalised

…’radicalised?’ With all those nice neighbours and friends in the international community just queuing up to support a few million Jews’ right not to be forced into the sea? How dare they be radicalised!

….as Israel’s. Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister who replaced Olmert as head of Kadima, watched as polls suggested the once discredited Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud leader, was going to pull off the biggest Holy Land recovery since Lazarus by sweeping the February election on a ticket of robustness towards Palestinian enemies.

…And your clairvoyance is spot on. I too know for sure that you’re right about this, as the Left were correct predicting GW Bush’s defeat in 2004…

I read the runes myself. What about you, Tom? Tea leaves? Tarot? Guardian and Times crosswords spell it all out, did they?

Let us stipulate the way the polls are going.

Israeli voters like strong leaders.

…Unlike the Arabs, who always elect elderly Quakers and other pacifists to represent them…

Yep, what Israel needs now is someone who’ll ignore that silly old ‘terrorism’ scare and tear down the Wall, and stuff.

By ordering an unprecedented air assault on Gaza, Miss Livni is now able to present herself as someone in that mould. Her polling numbers have already begun to tick up.

…Instead of saying; ’Just lie down and die, people of Sderot, Ashkelon and Western Negev, whilst I stand for office on an uncompromising ticket of Calling Mother On Friday Nights And Meeting A Nice Boy…

But as an outsider in Israel I am convinced that any short-term gain for Kadima will be at a much greater cost in the medium term. Op Cast Lead is proving a powerful recruiting drive for Hamas, encouraging thousands of young men to join, not just in Gaza but, more importantly, in the West Bank, where Israel had supposedly bought into the American-driven strategy of making Fatah the natural party of government.

…Better ban the Koran, Sira and Hadith then, don’t you think, Tom?

Friends who know the security sector of the West Bank have already seen a surge in popular support for Hamas and a collapse in that for Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah. Words such as “quisling” and “traitor” are being used by the West Bank media to describe Mr Abbas, as he puts out statements saying Hamas has brought the ferocity of Op Cast Lead on itself.

…So the default reaction of ‘moderate’ Arabs to a hitch in the PP is to assume that anyone not killing or calling for the killing of Israelis is to call them ‘traitors’ and ‘Quislings.’

Nice baseline there, for the PP to move forward once all this is sorted out by another ceasefire…

That does not play well on the Arab Street in Palestine when Gazans are dying by the hundred.

…Look at all the Jewish riots every day, everywhere, when some Islamist blows up their school bus, restaurant, or wedding reception…

By the way, ‘wedding reception’ is a rough English translation of the Arabic word meaning ’remote mountainside terrorist training camp.’ Google Guantanamo Bay for details..

The timing of the next Palestinian elections are unclear — there is a move to extend Mr Abbas’s term so that the cycle of presidential and parliamentary elections for the Palestinian national authority can be brought into line with each other.

…They say you’ll change the Constitution, well, you know.

Say, I wonder what John Lennon would say to all this?..

Just kidding.

I think I know.

But it is evident that the electoral fortunes of Hamas will have received a boost from Op Cast Lead. The Palestinian narrative is built around victimhood…

…No, really? Say it ain’t so, Tom.

… after the air assault, Hamas holds bragging rights to victim status.

…Only if the press make it seem so by selective editing, excluding equal coverage, lying…You know the drill.

As well as undermining Mr Abbas’s moderate leadership,

…to make a hollow laughing sound, to quote from Sir Terry Pratchett…

…the air assault has a regional impact of even greater significance. Talks between Syria and Israel, brokered by Turkey, have now been called off. “It is not possible to carry on the negotiations under these conditions,” a clearly exasperated Turkish foreign minister, Ali Babacan, said on Monday.

…Poor babies. Die, Jews, and stay schtum. Your betters are talking to other grownups.

It is hard to exaggerate how disappointing this is.

…But everyone was having such a good time… Try anyway, Tom: just try.

Britain has long argued that the key to peace in the Holy Land lies on the road to Damascus.

So, which twenty million Islamist nutters are going to be struck blind and have the truth of Jesus Christ revealed to them this time, Tom?

Syria is a key sponsor not just of Hamas but of Hizbollah, the militant group that draws from Lebanon’s Shia minority and that has proved such a menace to Israel.

…so maybe it’s an idea not to be too nice to them, right?

One of President Bush’s more clumsy foreign policy decisions was to isolate Syria for most of his presidency, but in the past two years he has given the green light for rapprochement. From that decision have flowed delicate talks and the hope that Damascus could be persuaded to deal a mortal blow to both Hizbollah and Hamas by turning off the funds, arms and support it has provided them with for years.

That’s obviously worked like a dream…

As the smoke continues to rise over Gaza, the tragic truth is that the hopes of wider peace in the Middle East also now lie in ashes.

…No, Tom, that would be six million European Jews and their Israeli descendants if the PP is allowed to arm Iran and its clients in Hamas with The Bomb.

The Guardian; an apology.

The editor and staff of TJAT would like to apologise unreservedly for portraying the above piece of ‘journalism’ as deriving from their newspaper or staff, which it did not in any way. We are sorry.

In fact, the piece reviewed above derives from a conservative paper and its writer.

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