And in doing so, completes Hamas' purported objective of causing massive civilian casualties for advertisement.
No, he doesn't complete their objective -- there is, of course, no genocide of Palestinians, and no actual mass murdering of civilians going on. Netanyahu just gets close enough for people like you to buy in to Hamas' idea.
"Hamas, I am going to destroy you by firing missiles on densely populated civilian areas where you strategically placed your arms, thereby giving you the results you need to become more popular!"
He's got two choices: Do that, or allow Hamas to operate a constant rolling barrage of rocket fire, which they would CERTAINLY do if Israel didn't do operations like this. As bad as option one is, it's obviously better than the alternative.
This is something out of Austin Powers. Do you understand how ridiculous that sounds. This talking point needs to die.
You'd have to be either quite ignorant or extremely unwiilling to actually look at the facts to not realize that Hamas intentionally puts rockets in civilian neighborhoods, fires from backyards, and intimidates civilians into staying put in danger zones. That is what they do, and the reason they do those things is to create more chaos, more Palestinian civilian casualties, and more outrage that people like you will wrongly aim at Israel instead of aiming the outrage where it should be going, at Hamas.
Its completely ridicoulous. Even worse its true.
Indeed.
So, what you're saying is: 'Screw modern scientists who researched the causes of WW1 for years, I stick to the common opinion of 1922'?
Oh, I've read plenty of that stuff before. I did major in History after all. But Germany really does deserve the largest share of the blame for the war happening.
Every country in Europe had similar alliances, and the major players, Germany, France, and Russia, were all preparing for war.
That's not really true. All sides were forming alliances, but no one thought that a war would happen -- the goal actually was to form these alliances in order to PREVENT war, because everyone thought that no one would be stupid enough to fight when they knew it'd drag in everyone! Of course, after the assassination of their heir, Austria got that stupid, and Germany's questionably-competent ruler decided to back them. So sure, France and Russia had armed themselves too, but they didn't start the war. Sure, Russia backed Serbia, and then Britain and France backed Russia, but all of that was tied to the alliance system -- they were expected to support their allies at that point. German support for Austria was the key, along with Austria itself wanting war with Serbia of course.
Don't say 'is basically' because you know you're ignoring a large swathe of the situation to fit your pre constructed narrative. 'Had to know' is beyond opinion and into imagining. The fact is simple. Germany did not start the first World War.
Who would you say did, Austria? Austria would not have invaded Serbia (the action which set off the rest of the war) without Germany's full backing -- the Austrian Emperor refused to go to war with Serbia without German support. So no. You are wrong. Germany IS responsible for the war happening.
Just as Palestine didn't start the current conflict with Israel, no matter which point on the timeline you want to pin it to. People may lie or decieve themselves about them, but facts do not lie.
Your facts do, if you're trying to fool people into thinking that anyone other than Hamas started this war. Israel did this in response to Hamas rocket fire.
What Israel engages in where Gaza is concerned is not self defense, it is collective punishment
This is a lie, responding to attack is self defense.
No, responding to attack is not aggression, obviously.
Wars can be awful things, but Israel's action here is entirely legal.
No one is saying that Israel should not have to the right to defend itself but the continued displacement of palestinians and seizure of their land is not self defense.
This is an entirely separate issue. What you are saying here is "well the West Bank Palestinians are losing ground to Israel settlers, so it's okay for Hamas in Gaza to do its best to randomly murder as many Israelis as it can", and that, blatantly obviously, fails completely to pass any kind of international law muster. I took a course on international law in college, and that is NOT a legal defense for war. Particularly not when the group doing the attacking is a terrorist group whose stated goal and purpose is genocide, and isn't even in the territory where the land seizures you're talking about are taking place. But even if they were, that would not be a proper response, and it's very counter-productive and hurts their chances for a real peace more than it helps them.
If the Palestinians actually want peace, peaceful resistance (and no, rock-throwing isn't peaceful) will be much, much more likely to get them somewhere than this does. Hamas's constant wars don't only get them nothing, they keep setting back any chance of peace in the Middle East. How can anyone say that they want peace in that region, while not recognizing that Hamas is the largest impediment to any forward progress? Sure, the Israeli government and the West Bank government have lots of problems (from extremists on their side who don't want peace) and so far have never been able to get a deal both sides can agree to, but at least they have at times been willing to seriously discuss the issue. That is not the case with Hamas, of course.
The Iron Dome is defense, the military operations that Israel enacts in Gaza are not,
So you don't understand what self-defense means, then. Look it up.
and you can see every independent report from organizations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty international, and so on, are coming to the same conclusion. Are you claiming that virtually every human rights organization and the UN are all Israel hating anti semites?
Some of the things you've linked make me wonder, yes, but just about the cherrypicked reports you link; of course other reports from those organizations are better. Anything blaming Israel for attacking civilians in Gaza should recognize that almost all of those attacks happen because of things Hamas did, etc. That makes those things more Hamas's fault than Israel's.
And reports that try to say Hamas doesn't use human shields... :lol, that's too absurd for words! That Hamas regularly does such things is an extremely well-documented fact. They do it over and over and over. Plenty of good examples, with sources, are easily found at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas#Children_and_women_as_human_shields
They are almost exclusively killing civilians. How many civilian deaths so far for what is reported as under 100 hamas agents? Over 600?
That's not "almost exclusively"! Once again, if you look up WWII bombing, you'd see very different figures from those. Also, many of those casualties aren't from bombing, they're from after the troops invaded -- and that people aren't getting out of the way is in large part because of Hamas wanting them to stay there so more people get killed.
So no, they are not "almost exclusively" killing civilians, and regardless they would be killing many fewer civilians if not for Hamas' tactics.
