Israeli–Palestinian conflict

[Magpietothemax]

*
Counter terrorism.

Terrorism is targeted at a civilian population, this was targeted at operatives of a terrorist organisation. The difference is pretty clear to anyone who isn't hopelessly biased or anti semitic or both.

So when when Israel carries out a recognised war crime ("indiscriminant", "treacherous-using booby traps"", it is "counter-terrorism".
This is just pure propaganda in defence of state terrorism.

[Magpietothemax]

^And your mates, Culprit and Durka, are also bigots who likewise celebrate terrorist violence when Israel carries it out, because it is only Arabs/Muslims who are being obliterated.
Disgusting. Reprehensible.

[Magpietothemax]

Israel have resorted to terrorism there is no other way to describe it.

Thankfully, there is someone here who knows how to call reality.

[Magpietothemax]

The rent-a-crowd is out in Melb this week. Have to battle them tomorrow when I go into the convention centre for a few hours with my work. Let's block roads and disrupt in an attempt to get support.

Agree, protest is futile.

Not because right wingers like yourself can't get to work. That is utterly irrelevent.

But because the Australian government supports the genocide in Gaza, and likewise is transforming Australia into a nuclear target by totally integrating Northern Australia into the US war machine as a platform for war against China.

Appealing to the war criminals in Parliament is like appealing to the Devil to change his ways, and be more compassionate.

[stui magpie]

@Magpietothemax

Rigging a bunch of pagers purchased by hezbollah for use by hezbollah is hardly indiscriminant. It's a targeted strike and doesn't fall under the "booby trap" criteria. Firing rockets constantly into civilian areas IS indiscriminant (you could also put a lot of Israels bombing in Gaza under the category of indiscriminant)

Call me a bigot if you like, I'd respond with "Thats rich from an anti-semite"

Now Israel has taken out a senior Hezbollah leader.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/20/worl ... index.html

[Culprit]

*
Counter terrorism.

Terrorism is targeted at a civilian population, this was targeted at operatives of a terrorist organisation. The difference is pretty clear to anyone who isn't hopelessly biased or anti semitic or both.

The Terrorists are in disarray with no leadership and too scared of digital communications.

[Magpietothemax]

@Magpietothemax

Rigging a bunch of pagers purchased by hezbollah for use by hezbollah is hardly indiscriminant. It's a targeted strike and doesn't fall under the "booby trap" criteria. Firing rockets constantly into civilian areas IS indiscriminant (you could also put a lot of Israels bombing in Gaza under the category of indiscriminant)

Call me a bigot if you like, I'd respond with "Thats rich from an anti-semite"

Now Israel has taken out a senior Hezbollah leader.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/20/worl ... index.html

Classic. Opposition to genocide is the same as anti-Semitism. Exactly what the media, Albanese and Dutton are all promoting. This scandalous conflation of opposition to genocide with anti-Semitism is being used to try to prevent all anti war opposition. You will be one of the leaders of the cheer squad for police state measures.

As for targeting Hezbollah only, this is a complete lie, as proven by the results. Hundreds of civilians maimed and disfigured forever, and several killed.

Several years ago, the US government (and the Australian government) were on a crusade : the war against terrorism.

Now the US government is embracing terrorism as a legitimate method of warfare. Obama started it with his "Terror Tuesday" meetings where he met with Pentagon/CIA officials and plotted drone assassinations - even of US citizens - and naturally killed civilians at the same time who were written off as "collateral damage".

Now the US is endorsing Israel assassinations by exploding mobile phones and pagers en masse.

Richardson, a right wing ex Labor minister was on Sky news just recently. He blurted out the position of the Albanese government (which is the same as yours): that the use of booby trapped mobile phones and pagers to kill indiscriminately is "brilliant".

You are a bigot, and you are a liar, because nothing i have posted is anti-Semitic.

[Magpietothemax]

Culprit:

"The Terrorists are in disarray with no leadership and too scared of digital communications."

Response:

The true terrorists in fact were the ones who exploded the mobile phones and pagers indiscriminately, targeting just anyone in the Lebanese population.
Unfortunately, Mossad and the Israeli state still has its Nazi like leadership intact, and will continue to use open terrorism as a means of warfare because the US government, and all its allies, including the Albanese government here, give it their full support.

Those who celebrate Israel's mass detonation of electronic devices in Lebanon are supporters of terrorism.

[David]

The response to stories like these reminds me a bit of the old Stalin quote about one person’s death being a tragedy, but a million being a statistic. I remember when Bin Laden was assassinated there was a fair bit of openly voiced disquiet about a man being extrajudicially gunned down in his compound. True, many of the people celebrating this pager attack were hooting and hollering then, too, but there was also recognition in mainstream discourse that it was a revenge operation occurring outside the rules of war, and this was despite Bin Laden being known to be a mass murderer.

Now, thousands of people have been pretty indiscriminately maimed and/or disfigured and at least a few dozen killed, even though nobody much knows who they are (including Israel’s own security forces, who only know that the booby-trapped devices were supposed to end up in the hands of Hezbollah members – no matter how low-ranking or whether they were even from the organisation's military wing – not that they did, or who specifically would have had them at any given point in time) and it’s being widely celebrated as an act of tactical genius. It plays quite well into long-held Western mythology about Israel as a country of brave people who play outside the rules (the fact that they’re not quite “us” gives us some critical distance to nod at the stuff that our armies couldn’t get away with) while under constant threat from faceless savages. All the victims here are Hezbollah, i.e. terrorists, i.e. the interchangeable bearded puppets from Team America: World Police – 3000-odd mini-Bin Ladens. This doesn’t stand up under the slightest scrutiny, of course, such as when you consider that these are in many cases just ordinary people locked in what they consider to be a patriotic war, that Mossad operatives are every bit as ruthless and murderous as Hezbollah fighters, that the two sides are locked in decades-long territorial conflict and that civilians in southern Lebanon have (since 1982, if not before) been just as much if not more at risk from Israel than residents of northern Israel are from Hezbollah rockets.

Acceptance of any atrocity begins with dehumanisation. Of course, it goes without saying that Arabs are dehumanised in the white Western imagination – we’ve always known that. But it’s important to recognise that dehumanisation makes everything permissible, no matter how appalling or horrific or outside the laws of engagement, so long as a flimsy tactical justification can be attached. So don’t be surprised when the goalposts keep shifting and worse and worse acts keep getting our governments’ and media’s seal of approval.

Another angle on this that I think has been overlooked by the pro-Israel side is the frightening precedent that this sets. Even if you think Israel is entitled to do whatever it likes and you don't care how many Lebanese people had their faces blown off, now Mossad have shown that something like this is possible, it’s something that any terrorist organisation can copy or adapt for their own purposes: intercept a shipment of smartphones, booby-trap them and use a text message to pull the trigger weeks or months down the track, leading to the exact same consequences for hundreds or thousands of random people here in Australia. It’s like something out of a Hollywood movie, but a lot less fun when you're no longer watching it from a distance in the cheap seats.

Some Pandora’s boxes should never be opened, and this is an evil I would have preferred not to have seen unleashed into the world.

[Magpietothemax]

^Very well explained, David.
As you mention, Hezbollah is not merely a military force. It is an entire social network which provides a myriad of social services throughout southern Lebanon. A "Hezbollah operative" could be a nurse at an infant child care centre for example.
As you mention, this barbaric and criminal operation sets a precedent. No western government has condemned this action of state terrorism. Their silence is approval. It is well known that the US uses Israel to trial new weapons and new warfare techniques. After ""successful trials"" in Israel, these techniques are then incorporated into US military tactics and into US domestic policing.
The definition of war is being expanded to include the open state terrorism that Mossad is now pioneering.
We must now prepare for similar acts of state terrorism in the future...will the Ukrainian Secret services draw a leaf from Mossad next and booby trap the phones of "Putin operatives" ? How will Putin respond? By "expanding the definition of war"" once again, and using nuclear weapons?

[stui magpie]

@David

From what I understand, it's not as simple as intercepting a shipment of PED's and rigging them to explode.

The New York Post (I believe) wrote that Mossad had actually planned this years in advance, at the time Hezbollah and others started dropping mobile phones. Allegedly they actually set up a shell compay manufacturing legitimate pagers. When the orders came in that they were clear were from Hezbollah, they were not just implanted with 3 grams of plastic explosive, but some additional hardware and software was added to be able to trigger the blast at a time of their choosing.

Mossad has a long history of getting inventive with tech. There's a story going back to after the Munic Olympics where Israeli athletes were killed. Someone got into the office of one of the organisers of that and planted explosives in his landline. Then someone rang the landline asking to speak to him, when he confirmed who was speaking, they triggered it and blew his head off.

That's why the Mossad is one of the most feared intelligence agencies in the world.

If a terrorist group was somehow able to replicate what Mossad did with pagers, but with phones, they'd need some serious tech. Phones are much more complicated than pagers.

[David]

Israel is bombing Lebanon now, and has already killed hundreds. The goal is a regional war that pulls Iran in, and I suspect they’ll get their wish.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3wy8kpy3eo.amp

[Magpietothemax]

^Yes precisely true, as the wsws explained on October 8 2023. The Gaza genocide was never going to be confined to Gaza alone. The US attack dog Israel is now carrying out the US plans for reorganising the Middle East in its own interests.

The US is politically, financially and militarily supporting Israel's current bombardment of Lebanon. Already, in one night, 492 Lebanese people are dead. In 2006, in one month of war between Israel and Lebanon, 1,000 people were killed in total. So in one day, Israel has killed 50% of those killed in one month during the last major conflict between Hezbollah and Israel.

US political figures, like Anthony Blinken are resorting now to Orwellian doublespeak, claiming that Israel is "escalating in order to de-escalate", and "Israel has the right to defend itself".
But the real agenda of the Netahyu fascist regime is a land grab in southern Lebanon. This was directly articulated by Chikli, a minister in the Israeli government:
“Lebanon, even though it has a flag and even though it has political institutions, does not meet the definition of a country. The drawing lines of Sykes and Picot, which were based on the distribution of areas of influence and resources between Great Britain and France, did not survive the test of time".

So Israel, by its own admission, is taking it upon itself to redraw the borders of Lebanon, for its own purposes, and those of US imperialism.

It goes without saying that is not aimed at "de-escalation" and nor is it about "self-defence".

[Durka]

^Yes precisely true, as the wsws explained on October 8 2023. The Gaza genocide was never going to be confined to Gaza alone. The US attack dog Israel is now carrying out the US plans for reorganising the Middle East in its own interests.

Part of the reason that I keep coming back here is because I learn so much from you. You know what is going on, deep within the administrations of other countries, when even the media in those countries don't have your wealth of knowledge. Congratulations to you - you are a marvel!

So, with all of your knowledge, can you tell me:

1. Why the USA wants to reorganise the Middle East?
2. What the USA's interests in the Middle East are?
3. How the USA intends to reorganise the Middle East?; and
4. What the Middle East will look like when the USA has finished with its reorganisation?

Don't give me the Team America answer either : "Let me tell you how all this works. You see, Team America is funded by the corporations, so they fight for the corporations, while they sit in their corporation buildings, and they're all corporationary, and they make lots of money".

[David]

The strategic ambition is regional hegemony, i.e. having a Middle East full of allies and client states. Regime change in Iran is an important goal within that because Iran is the leader of the oppositional, Russia-aligned power bloc – that is, oppositional to the interests of the US and its key allies in Israel and Saudi Arabia – that takes in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen. Ideally, for the US, they and every other Middle Eastern country would eventually be part of a homogeneous region under America's thumb.

This goal also guarantees control of oil supplies, shipping routes and so on, which of course is heavily in America's financial interests given how resource-rich this part of the world is. So it's part economic, part territorial and part ideological (given the commitment of many in the US government to the concept of Zionism, neoliberalism, etc.) That's a simplified answer, but I think it covers most of it.