Israel Drops White Phosphorus Bombs On Children

oralloy wrote:

Paaskynen wrote:

Furthermore, I point out that rust forms when iron reacts with oxygen, reaction with oxygen is known as burning, burning occurs especially at high temperatures like those caused by an explosion (Have you never seen a burnt vehicle before?)

Rust is a very slow reaction. You can't just set a fire and get rust.

But what you can get with a good fire is most of the paint burnt off the vehicle.

There still seemed to be a lot of paint on the ambulance, though the paint was showing its age.

Sorry, Oralloy, but you are incorrect.

May I suggest you do a little experiment. Take a piece of unpainted iron and put it in a furnace for a very short while, then leave to cool in the open air and you will see that a thin layer of rust forms quite quickly. Have you never made campfires as a kid and seen how iron that was in the fire becomes red with rust soon after you put the fire out.

If you consider that waste water treatment plants and power plants are valid military targets, you must assume that Israel is at war with the Palestinian people--not with terrorists, but with the Palestinian people as a whole.

That would be in contravention of the diplomatic engagements which Israel has made, and it would (in the case of the waste water treatment plant) be in violation of international agreements on the conduct of war, to which Israel is a signatory.

Basically, you're just saying that you approve of any measures which Israel takes, ....

...and view all Palestinians as terrorists, or enemy combatants at the least. It's not that this surprises me, i just wanted you to be put in the position of admitting it.

Any Palestinian who dies of a septic disease is just as dead as any Israeli killed by a suicide bomber. You won't get the melodramatic effect of which you are so fond (Eeeek ! ! ! They're cutting my head off while i scream ! ! !)--but dead is dead. You have an active double standard operating here, but i don't expect that you'll ever admit it, and the rest of us have long known it.

You claim that there is a difference of degree of guilt? How is a Palestinian victim of indiscriminate Israeli bombing any more guilty than the Isreali vicitim of a Palestinian suicide bomber? You're not making much sense here.

By the way, you are once again peddling historical horseshit--there have not been attacks in every war which get a few civilians by mistake.

Given that you continue to ignore just how many thousands of lives are endangered by the destruction of a sewage treatment plant and the electrical grid in a crowded city of more than a million inhabitants, i suspect that further discussion will do nothing to enlighten you as to just how reprehensible it is to make such facilities targets. How are hospitals supposed to run effectively without electricity? How are they then going to be able to treat the people who sicken due to raw sewage running in the streets?

Yes, i doubt that further discussion will ever get you to acknowledge the reality of Israeli state-sponsored terrorism against non-combattants.

Whereas you simply ignore any civilian victims made by Israeli bombing, or simply shrug them of as : 'Unfortunate bystanders', or 'the few civilians (define few, will you? Your definition of few seems to be inconsistent) that die in every war'. You know, a palestinian family will cry just as much over their child when he dies in a millitary strike, as the Israeli family does when their child dies from a terrorsit bomb attack.

You have a persistent need to excuse the deaths caused by Israeli because of
a) they come from the millitary, and are state sanctioned.
b) They are meant to strike down terrorists who are unequivocally branded as monsters by you.

Now, you state: This is just. I will only claim it to be unjust if you can proof that the Israeli army has deliberately targetted civilians.
Setanta provided links to the targets selected by Israeli high command in an attempt to deliberately endanger civilian life... And as of yet you have not answered him. While you keep on railing that he had to provide such evidence in the first place.
Guess what that attitude makes you.

I'm not singling the Israelis out for special censure, and i'm sure Naj is not either. What i am doing (and Naj perhaps as well), is objecting to that attitude which deplores and rants about terrorist bombings, but attempts to brush aside Israeli state terror as insignificant.

I'm not singling the Israelis out for special censure, and i'm sure Naj is not either. What i am doing (and Naj perhaps as well), is objecting to that attitude which deplores and rants about terrorist bombings, but attempts to brush aside Israeli state terror as insignificant.

Setanta wrote:

I'm not singling the Israelis out for special censure, and i'm sure Naj is not either. What i am doing (and Naj perhaps as well), is objecting to that attitude which deplores and rants about terrorist bombings, but attempts to brush aside Israeli state terror as insignificant.

Give a single example of Israeli state terror.

Brandon9000 wrote:

Setanta wrote:

I'm not singling the Israelis out for special censure, and i'm sure Naj is not either. What i am doing (and Naj perhaps as well), is objecting to that attitude which deplores and rants about terrorist bombings, but attempts to brush aside Israeli state terror as insignificant.

Give a single example of Israeli state terror.

You are intentionally being obtuse? Go back and look at the links describing attacks on the power grid and waste water treatment plant in Gaza.

najmelliw wrote:

Whereas you simply ignore any civilian victims made by Israeli bombing, or simply shrug them of as : 'Unfortunate bystanders', or 'the few civilians (define few, will you? Your definition of few seems to be inconsistent) that die in every war'. You know, a palestinian family will cry just as much over their child when he dies in a millitary strike, as the Israeli family does when their child dies from a terrorsit bomb attack.

You have a persistent need to excuse the deaths caused by Israeli because of
a) they come from the millitary, and are state sanctioned.
b) They are meant to strike down terrorists who are unequivocally branded as monsters by you.

Now, you state: This is just. I will only claim it to be unjust if you can proof that the Israeli army has deliberately targetted civilians.
Setanta provided links to the targets selected by Israeli high command in an attempt to deliberately endanger civilian life... And as of yet you have not answered him. While you keep on railing that he had to provide such evidence in the first place.
Guess what that attitude makes you.

I answered him at 3:53 AM on Monday.

As you say, if the Israelis bomb a Palestinian munitions factory and a child on the street is killed, his parents will mourn just as much for him as will the parents of a child killed when the Palestinians bomb a school bus. Your conclusion that this puts the bombing of a munitions factory and a school bus in the same moral category is ludicrous. If you think that bombing a munitions factory and bombing a school bus are morally indistinguishable, then it only signifies that you are amoral.

You cannot single out the Israelis for special censure for simply conducting war the way it has always been conducted, that is bombing valid military targets and accepting the inevitability of some civilian casualties by accident.

Brandon9000 wrote:

najmelliw wrote:

Whereas you simply ignore any civilian victims made by Israeli bombing, or simply shrug them of as : 'Unfortunate bystanders', or 'the few civilians (define few, will you? Your definition of few seems to be inconsistent) that die in every war'. You know, a palestinian family will cry just as much over their child when he dies in a millitary strike, as the Israeli family does when their child dies from a terrorsit bomb attack.

You have a persistent need to excuse the deaths caused by Israeli because of
a) they come from the millitary, and are state sanctioned.
b) They are meant to strike down terrorists who are unequivocally branded as monsters by you.

Now, you state: This is just. I will only claim it to be unjust if you can proof that the Israeli army has deliberately targetted civilians.
Setanta provided links to the targets selected by Israeli high command in an attempt to deliberately endanger civilian life... And as of yet you have not answered him. While you keep on railing that he had to provide such evidence in the first place.
Guess what that attitude makes you.

I answered him at 3:53 AM on Monday.

As you say, if the Israelis bomb a Palestinian munitions factory and a child on the street is killed, his parents will mourn just as much for him as will the parents of a child killed when the Palestinians bomb a school bus. Your conclusion that this puts the bombing of a munitions factory and a school bus in the same moral category is ludicrous. If you think that bombing a munitions factory and bombing a school bus are morally indistinguishable, then it only signifies that you are amoral.

You cannot single out the Israelis for special censure for simply conducting war the way it has always been conducted, that is bombing valid military targets and accepting the inevitability of some civilian casualties by accident.

I believe we were not talking about deaths caused by Israel targetting a munitions factory. As deplorable as a war is, in order to wage it you have to beat the enemy and in order to do that, you either kill the soldiers, or destroy the wapons or the ammo... or all three. (Of course there are more options, but this discussion is not about the art of war... more about it's ethics) I find terrorist attacks such as those the Hezbollah and Hamas sanctions and commits horrible and deplorable.
But this doesn't mean those attacks can be used as some sort of blanket excuse to commit to questionable attacks that hold a high risk of civilian casualties and are directed against targets which are not millitary in nature (such as the sewage plant).
These actions, and the deaths that resulted from it, seem to be above reproach. At best, you commit a platitude as 'there are civilian casualties in every war' as a sop for your conscience. Humanity is gifted with the ability to analyze and question it's actions, in order to see if those actions are acceptable according to the rules. Palestinian terrorists break those rules, as you have noticed and pointed out countless times. But you refuse to analyze and question the Israeli motives. Why? In the end, both Israelis and Palestinians are humans, both have dead victims over which families grieve.