This Gaza Invasion must be stopped!!!

[theblackhole]

One third of Gaza dead are children
Friday, 9 January 2009

More than 250 children have been killed in the Gaza fighting, according to the UN.

Children make up more than half of the crowded region's 1.4 million population and are the most defenceless victims of the war between Israel and Hamas.

The Israeli army has unleashed unprecedented force in its campaign against Hamas militants, who have been taking cover among civilians.

A photo of four-year-old Kaukab Al Dayah, just her bloodied head sticking out from the rubble of her home, covered many front pages in the Arab world earlier this week. "This is Israel," read the headline in the Egyptian daily Al-Masry Al-Youm.

Kaukab was killed on Tuesday when an F-16 attacked her family's four-storey home in Gaza City. Four adults also died.

As many as 257 children have been killed and 1,080 wounded - about a third of the total casualties since December 27, the UN said yesterday.

Israel says it is targeting Hamas in response to its repeated rocket attacks on southern Israel, and is doing its utmost to avoid civilian deaths.

However foreign aid officials say that civilians cannot escape blockaded Gaza and that bombing crowded areas inevitably leads to civilian casualties.

The Israeli military has used tank and artillery shells, as well as large aerial bombs.

Children have been killed in strikes on their houses, while travelling in cars with their parents, while playing in the streets, walking to a grocery and even at UN shelters.

Sayed, Mohammed and Raida Abu Aisheh - ages 12, 8 and 7 - were at home with their parents when they were all killed in an Israeli airstrike before dawn on Monday. The family had remained in the ground floor apartment of their three-storey building, while the rest of the extended clan sought refuge in the basement from heavy bombardment of nearby Hamas installations.

In the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City, doctors found four young children next to their dead mothers in a house, the Red Cross said.

In the Jebaliya refugee camp, five sisters from the Balousha family, ages 4, 8, 11, 14 and 17, were buried together in white shrouds on December 29. An Israeli airstrike on a mosque, presumably a Hamas target, had destroyed their adjacent house. Only their parents and a baby girl survived.

Israel accuses Hamas of cynically exploiting Gaza's civilians and using them as human shields. The military has released video footage showing militants firing mortars from the rooftops of homes and mosques.

In the chaos of Gaza, it is difficult to get exact casualty figures. Since December 27, at least 750 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza Health Ministry officials.

At least 169 were 17 and younger, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, which has staff at hospitals to track casualties. Unicef said at least 100 children were killed in the first 10 days of fighting.

"We are talking about urban war," said a spokesman for Unicef in the Middle East and North Africa. "The density of the population is so high, it's bound to hurt children ... This is a unique conflict, where there is nowhere to go."

Successive generations of Gaza children have grown up with violence, part of the accelerating conflict with Israel. In the late 1980s, many threw stones at Israeli soldiers in a revolt against occupation. In the second uprising, starting in 2000, some were recruited by Hamas as suicide bombers.

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the hatred for the israelis will last for generations....these traumatised kids and children will grow up to hate israel for generations to come and they will do anything - anything yes - to seek revenge and seek the annihilation of these brute murderers.

 

[theblackhole]

Gilad Atzmon - The Old Testament and the Genocide in Gaza

By Gilad Atzmon • Jan 8th, 2009 at 0:11 •

"You will chase your enemies, and they shall fall by the sword before you. Five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight; your enemies shall fall by the sword before you.”
Leviticus, Chapter 26, verses 7-9.

"When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations…then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy.”
Deuteronomy 7:1-2,

"…do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them…as the Lord your God has commanded you…”
Deuteronomy 20:16

There is not much doubt amongst Biblical scholars that the Hebrew Bible contains some highly charged non-ethical suggestions, some of which are no less than a call for a genocide. Biblical scholar Raymund Schwager has found in the Old Testament 600 passages of explicit violence, 1000 descriptive verses of God's own violent actions of punishment, 100 passages where God expressly commands others to kill people. Apparently, violence is the most often mentioned activity in the Hebrew Bible.

As devastating as it may be, the Hebrew Bible saturation with violence and extermination of others may throw some light over the horrifying genocide conducted momentarily in Gaza by the Jewish state. In broad daylight, the IDF is using the most lethal methods against civilians as if their main objective is to ‘destroy’ the Gazans while showing ‘no mercy’ whatsoever.

Interestingly enough, Israel regards itself as a secular state. Ehud Barak is not exactly a qualified Rabbi and Tzipi Livni is not a Rabbi’s wife. Accordingly, we are entitled to assume that it isn’t actually Judaism per se that directly transforms Israeli politicians and military leaders into war criminals. Moreover, early Zionists believed that within a national home Jews would become 'people like all other people', i.e., civilised and ethical. In that very respect, Israeli reality is pretty peculiar. The Hebraic secular Jews may have managed to drop their God, most of them do not follow Judaic law, they are largely secular, and yet they collectively interpret their Jewish identity as a genocidal mission. They have successfully managed to transform the Bible from being a spiritual text into a bloodsoaked land registry. They are there, in Zion i.e., Palestine, to invade the land and to lock up, starve and destroy its indigenous habitants. Accordingly, it seems as if the artillery commanders and IAF pilots that erased northern Gaza two nights ago were following Deuteronomy 20:16 they indeed did ".. not leave alive anything that breathes.” And yet, one question is left open. Why should a secular commander follow Deuteronomy verses or any other Biblical text?

Some very few sporadic Jewish voices within the left are insisting upon telling us that Jewishness is not necessarily inherently murderous. I tend to believe them that they themselves consider their words as genuine and truthful. But then one may wonder, what is it that makes the Jewish state brutal with no comparison? The truth of the matter is actually pretty sad. As far as we can see, Zionism is the only secular ideological and political Jewish collective around and as it happens, it has proved once again this week that it is genocidal to the bone.

As far as genocide is concerned the difference between Judaism and Zionism can be illustrated as follows: while the Judaic Biblical context is soaked with genocidal references, usually in the name of God, within the Zionist context, Jews are killing Palestinians in the name of themselves i.e., the ‘Jewish people’. This is indeed the ultimate success of the Zionist revolution. It taught the Jews to believe in themselves. To believe in the Jewish state. ‘The Israeli’ is Israel’s God. Accordingly, the Israeli kills in the name of ‘his or her security’, in the name of ‘his or her democracy’. The Israelis destroy in the name of ‘their war against terror’ and in the name the ‘their America’. Seemingly, in the Jewish state, the Hebraic subject reverts to mass killing as soon as he finds a ‘name’ to associate with.

This doesn’t really leave us too much room for speculation. The Jewish state is the ultimate threat to humanity and our notion of humanism. Christianity, Islam and humanism came along with an attempt to amend Jewish tribal fundamentalism and to replace it with universal ethics. Enlightenment, liberalism and emancipation allowed Jews to redeem themselves from their ancient tribal supremacist traits. Since the mid 19th century, many Jews had been breaking out of their cultural and tribal chain. Tragically enough, Zionism managed to pull many Jews back in. Currently, Israel and Zionism are the only collective voice available for Jews.

The last twelve days of merciless offensive against the Palestinian civilian population does not leave any room for doubt. Israel is the gravest danger to world peace. Clearly the nations made a tragic mistake in 1947 giving a volatile racially orientated identity an opportunity to set itself into a national state. However, the nations’ duty now is to peacefully dismantle that state before it is too late. We must do it before the Jewish state and its forceful lobbies around the world manage to pull us all into a global war in the ‘name’ of one banal populist ideology or another (democracy, war against terror, cultural clash and so on). We have to wake up now before our one and only planet is transformed into a bursting boil of hatred.