I was hoping this doesn't come up in this forum. Hamas is evil, but to me, they are just a byproduct of the evil of wholesale terrorism. While groups like Hamas and Hezbollah do bad things, things that are very upsetting and go against the very ideas of ethics and such, they are only retail terrorists. They do kill people, and they do use scare tactics and guerilla warfare, but to me, Israel and America have committed the same, with one exception, they are more powerful, much more powerful, they are more calculated and commit murder on a mass scale that is efficient, and they have killed more people than any of the peon retail terrorists ever could. They are the wholesale terrorists. They distribute terror on a mass scale, with top of the line tech and military to do so.
"Similarly, Israel can invade other countries freely, bomb them at will, and kill civilians there with a free hand without penalty. Each time it has invaded Lebanon, killing many thousands of civilians and deliberately creating large refugee populations, this has led to no substantive responses whatever on the part of the United States and its allies, and the mainstream media have reported these de facto aggressions with great understanding of Israel's position and alleged “security” needs. Even mass slaughters of civilians are permissible for Israel, as in the case of Ariel Sharon's admitting the Christian Phalange to the Sabra-Shatila camp in 1982 where 2,000 or more Palestinian women, children, and old men were butchered in cold blood. We may recall the official and media outrage at the alleged massacre of some 40 Kosovo Albanians by the Serbs at Racak in January 1999—a massacre which may never have occurred, as shown in a belatedly released analysis of the forensic findings on the bodies in Forensic Science International [116: 171-185, 2001]—and recall also that the figure 2,000 has been widely accepted as the total of killings on all sides in Kosovo in the year preceding the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. But in the case of the 2,000 purely civilian victims of Israel, the international outcry was modest and resulted in no penalty or constraint on Israel's ability to kill. Israel was also free to organize and maintain a proxy army in South Lebanon to serve its post-invasion “iron fist” cross-border policies. If done by Libya such an arrangement would be condemned as sponsorship of international terrorism, but again, both the sponsorship of a terrorist army and the numerous “iron fist” killings were not condemned by the United States or its allies and this approved international terrorism could proceed at the terrorist's discretion.
Israel's occupation has produced two “Intifadas,” both rooted in the severity of Israel's abuse of Palestinians in the occupied territories. In the first, which lasted some five years, over a thousand Palestinians were killed and many thousands were injured. The West did not intervene at all in this process even though Israel's abuses were in violation of UN resolutions and international law; U.S. economic and military aid to the ethnic cleanser did not shrink, and Israel was therefore free to kill and repress with no apparent limit. The same has been true in the case of the second Intifada, which began in September 2000. Israel has so far killed about 400 Palestinians, injured thousands, and escalated the brutality of its army's repression in the occupied territories in a genuine anti-civilian war, preventing Palestinians from working, harvesting crops, and obtaining medical care. But again the United States supports Israel without limit and the international community in general does nothing substantive for the victims.
Yasar Arafat has asked for UN intervention to protect the Palestinians who have been under harsh military attack and Amnesty International has called for international observers. But Israel is against this, the United States supports Israel, so no protection is forthcoming. As noted earlier, the contrast with Kosovo, and the consistency with U.S. (and British) deference to Indonesia's rights to ethnically cleanse East Timor in 1999 and earlier, are enlightening. It was also noted that Israel's and Indonesia's violence and ethnic cleansing have taken place in illegally occupied territory, whereas Yugoslavia's occurred within its own borders and in territory where international observers had already been admitted."
And also:
Hamas better be careful next time they fire their gun powder laced paper-toilet tubes at Israel, cuz as we all know, roughly, 1 Israeli life is worth 100 palestinian lives.
