Wednesday, July 23, 2014

The Telegenic Dead

Look, I usually add a graphic to my blog posts,
but this:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Hamas of cynically exploiting Palestinian deaths to create striking televised images that will garner international sympathy. 
In an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Sunday, Netanyahu said Palestinian members of Hamas “don’t care” about the casualties they have inflicted on their own people. 
“These people are the worst terrorists — genocidal terrorists,” he said. “They call for the destruction of Israel and they call for the killing of every Jew, wherever they can find them.” 
“They want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can,” Netanyahu added. “They use telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause. They want the more dead, the better.”

They aren't telegenic--they've been on my Twitter feed for the past more than a week. They aren't telegenic after what happened. Yes, Hamas raises money over these dead bodies.  But hey--how's about this? Why be willing to send a missile through a bedroom with children on the 3rd floor to hit Hamas in the basement?

No doubt Hamas raises money on dead kids. No doubt they gin up sympathy and stuff--but the real way to shut it down?

Don't add to their martyrs. Shut them down by proving them wrong. For once just say--ain't Hamas some shit?  Fuck them, and then don't actually fuck over Palestinians in Gaza. I dunno. I think it could work.

4 comments:

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

Fuck them, and then don't actually fuck over Palestinians in Gaza.

You've got it backwards.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n15/mouin-rabbani/israel-mows-the-lawn

It’s often claimed that Israel’s reason for escalating this punitive regime to a new level of severity was to cause the overthrow of Hamas after its 2007 seizure of power in Gaza. The claim doesn’t stand up to serious scrutiny. Removing Hamas from power has indeed been a policy objective for the US and the EU ever since the Islamist movement won the 2006 parliamentary elections, and their combined efforts to undermine it helped set the stage for the ensuing Palestinian schism.

Israel’s agenda has been different. Had it been determined to end Hamas rule it could easily have done so, particularly while Hamas was still consolidating its control over Gaza in 2007, and without necessarily reversing the 2005 disengagement. Instead, it saw the schism between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority as an opportunity to further its policies of separation and fragmentation, and to deflect growing international pressure for an end to an occupation that has lasted nearly half a century. Its massive assaults on the Gaza Strip in 2008-9 (Operation Cast Lead) and 2012 (Operation Pillar of Defence), as well as countless individual attacks between and since, were in this context exercises in what the Israeli military called ‘mowing the lawn’: weakening Hamas and enhancing Israel’s powers of deterrence. As the 2009 Goldstone Report and other investigations have demonstrated, often in excruciating detail, the grass consists overwhelmingly of non-combatant Palestinian civilians, indiscriminately targeted by Israel’s precision weaponry.
-----------

Israel WANTS to target the Palestinian population and what little infrastructure they have left.

Hamas is Israel's current excuse to do.
~

Yastreblyansky said...

Of course the surviving blades of grass are likely to be more hostile to Israel than before they watched their friends and family members getting cut down: or as one handy guide to grass-cutting puts it,

When you mow the lawn, grass responds to the reduced surface area on its blades -- it must produce more growth to maximize photosynthesis processes. As a result, the grass concentrates its energy into blade and runner growth, depending on the species. For example, runners populate the open soil space around the mother grass plant so that more photosynthesis can benefit the lawn. Your turf becomes an intertwined layer that has enough energy to withstand constant mowing and other stresses, from heat to drought.

I think Thunder is right partly because it suits Israeli governments to be surrounded by enemies, distracting domestically from their corruption and incompetence and internationally justifying their militarization and the refusal to take down settlements.

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

Telegenically dead? What a freak! With the picnics thrown by people watching the bombs fall on Gaza to the Israeli "intellectual" claiming that the only way to stop suicide bombers is by raping their sisters, the Israelis sure are doing a piss-poor job at being the "good guys" in this particular atrocity.

Anonymous said...

The excuse that Hamas hides amongst civilians is pure bull can be readily countered with: "Where can a person hide in Gaza and not be amongst innocent men, women and children?" and for their asinine "We warned them to evacuate..." Where could they go?

Palestinians in Gaza are in a killing field designed my Israelis period.

Oh Look, We Found GA Voter Fraud

 It turns out, it was the GOP all along--or anyway, there was an election-denier who weirdly enough submitted multiple ineligible GOP ballot...