Mikeuk

Seems you haven't been following the opinion polls.

A small minority of pro-Israeli opinion hardly counts as 'mainstream'

Axos

.

Excuse me but don't assume things about me.

Jackanory, jackanory.

What constitutes a first class citizen in the Arab world? If the genearl Arab populace are second class citizens then lucky them, they have been elevated compared to Arabs that live in Islamic shitholes.



Yeah well, Israeli has seen Arab agression ever since Israel was formed, but the good news is, Israel can fight better and has more powerful bombs, which is why every Arab country that has attacked Israel has had its **** kicked severely.


Apart from you, and your kind who cares. International law laugh's in the face of Israel, and does not allow it the same rights as any other country, therefore International law is an ass, and Israel do well to ignore it. Terrorists organisation like hezbollah, hamas etc, not only laugh in the face of Intermational law, but also use civilians as shields, and fire rockets at Israel from civilian areas.

They are cowards, and I hope Israel route out everyone of them and send them off to paradise quickly and efficiently. I think that is more likely to happen then anything you say. I couldn't care less how many side with terroists like hezbollah and hamas, Israel and the USA will thrash them.

__________________
Israel, be strong and of good courage!

Axos

The mainstream don't care, about Arab's playing the victim in the Middle east. where is your evidence to support that they do? Opinion polls mean nothing and are dependent on where the poll is.

The rally in Manchester for example was a big flop, all that attended where a couple of hundred rag tag, leftists, swps creeps and a few hundred Muslims. How do you figure that is the 'mainstream'?

__________________
Israel, be strong and of good courage!

Mikeuk

There watching it were we?

Welcome back 'Necon' (sic), Manchester-based fanatical Zionist.

Tony Bennett

Here's a viewpoint worth considering, from 'The Business'.

Highlights in bold:

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Article from The Business:

http://www.thebusinessonline.com/Sto...18366B3&page=0

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Iran takes lead in 60-year war to destroy Israel
23 July 2006

THE international clamour grows for a ceasefire in the latest Middle East hostilities; Israel seems determined to ignore it as its men and armour gather for what looks like a major incursion into Lebanon; the ondemnation of Israel grows ever louder for what is now generally agreed is a “disproportionate” response to Hezbollah provocation.

Pause before joining this global consensus (which does not yet include the United States and Great Britain, though both are under increasing pressure to join it). Consider two matters.

First (and less important), those who are so sure Israel’s response has been “disproportionate” (the buzz word of Israel’s critics) are least able to tell us what a “proportionate” response would have been.

When a terrorist group too powerful to be destroyed by its host country (Lebanon) and bent on the destruction of another (Israel) kidnaps your soldiers, kills others in the process, then rains down hundreds of rockets indiscriminately on your towns and cities, what exactly is the “proportionate” response?

It is not clear that turning the other cheek or token retaliation quite does the trick. After all, Israel has been restrained during previous Hezbollah provocations, prepared even to trade an inordinate number of terrorist prisoners for a few abducted Israeli soldiers; but that has hardly earned it brownie points with Hezbollah, as the citizens of Haifa and other parts of northern Israel on the receiving end of its rockets can no doubt testify.

Those who seek your destruction do not think more kindly of you when you show compromise and compassion; they see both as signs of weakness and redouble their efforts to destroy you.

Second (and paramount), what exactly would a ceasefire achieve? In the short term, of course, it would stop the civilian death toll on both sides of the border, but especially in Lebanon, where the fatalities and grief have been greatest and where Israel (like America in Iraq) has not done enough to minimise civilian casualties (though let it not be forgotten that Hezbollah places its rockets and terrorist cells in urban areas – using the local population as human shields – precisely because it knows Israel will inevitably kill civilians when it comes to destroy them).

But a ceasefire now is likely to mean far more civilian casualties on both sides of the border – and probably far beyond – later.

It is important to realise the wider significance of what is happening: in the 60-year war to destroy the state of Israel, Iran is now in the lead.

Those who used to be in the vanguard of Israel’s destruction – Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the PLO – have retired from the field with bloody noses and are even tut-tutting at Shi’ite Hezbollah’s antics, which they fear are also a threat to their Sunni regimes.

Now Iran has stepped up to the plate, with Syria in supporting role. It is using Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south to fight a proxy war against Israel and it is doing so as part of a wider strategy.

In leading the fight against Israel and developing its own nuclear arsenal, Iran is aspiring to become the regional superpower and bidding for the leadership of Political Islam – a leadership it will use to rid the Middle East of Western influence (which requires, among other things, the destruction of Israel) and create a new Shi’ite imperium. No wonder it is not only Israel that is nervous.

A ceasefire for the sake of it would not deflect Iran from its proxy war with Israel and the West. Tehran would regard it merely as a breathing space to equip Hezbollah with bigger and better missiles that could wreak havoc in a few years’ time in Tel Aviv or even Jerusalem; then we would witness what indiscriminate civilian casualties really look like.

Iran and Syria realise that Israel cannot be defeated by mass armies on the battlefield; that way has been tried often and failed every time. Now it faces the worst threat since the nearly fatal 1973 Yom Kippur war from Iranian-backed Islamic terrorists bent on its destruction and armed not just with AK47s and explosives but the latest in rocketry – and the ability to whip up an often fickle and ignorant Western public opinion against its enemy.

Israel faces the new threat at a time when anti-Israeli sentiment in the West has never been stronger or more strident.

A rampant Political Islam headed by an Iran with nuclear ambitions is as much a threat to the West as it is to Israel; but even though Israel is in the frontline against this threat the irony is that it can count on less support than ever from the West, whose political and media elites on the Left and Right are increasingly consumed by rampant hostility to Israel.

Those who lead the charge against Israel, of course, come from the same debased intellectual heritage that believed you could negotiate with Hitler and that Stalin was committed to world peace.

But for Israel, the soft underbelly of Western opinion is as much a threat as Hezbollah’s rockets.

Western capitals are rife with the view that, if only a ceasefire to current hostilities can be arranged, the so-called roadmap to a two-state solution can be revived and a peace settlement achieved.

Underlying this approach is the belief that Israeli intransigence is the real roadblock to peace. It is a view straight from cloud-cuckoo land.

There is no prospect of a peace process worth its name now that Iran and its surrogates are in the driving seat. Neither Iran nor Syria nor Hezbollah nor Hamas believe in the two-state solution; they believe in the destruction of Israel and the humiliation of the West.

Those who do believe (to varying degrees) in a two-state solution – Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, PLO – are increasingly marginalised. Yet Western capitals and commentators persist in believing that the old diplomatic game can be revived.

It is self-delusion on a massive scale.

In the current situation, a ceasefire will mean only a lull in hostilities as long as Hezbollah remains a state-within-a-state in Lebanon, the Beirut government remains too weak to dismantle it and Iran-Syria believe they are winning.

The military destruction of Hezbollah, of course, is not easy; but the price of not trying could be incalculable: if Hezbollah is not neutered now, it will have to be very soon by whatever it takes, before it is able to commit an unimaginable atrocity with Iran’s help.

A continued Israeli assault on Hezbollah is the only practical way to reduce its power and military capability and to make Iran and Syria realise that not everything is going their way in the proxy war they are currently waging; a limited ground intervention by Israel, of the sort which now looks increasingly likely, in addition to aerial bombardment, will be required to destroy underground bunkers and missiles caches.

Then we can start to look at longer-term solutions, including an international presence on the Israeli-Lebanese border strong enough to deter Hezbollah from a repeat performance of the past 10 days (unlike the present pathetic UN force) and a government in Beirut strong enough disarm Hezbollah’s military wing, as it is required to do under UN resolution 1559, which was part of the last “peace” deal.

Neither of these solutions will be easily arranged; indeed the odds are against them because solutions require goodwill on both sides – and there is precious little goodwill emanating from Tehran these days, a blunt truth that *liberal-left commentators in the West seem determined to ignore.

So consider this, a speech made last week by the Iranian Parliament Speaker, Gholam-Ali Haddad Adel, which summarises the false narrative being spread across the Islamic world which portrays Israel at the heart of a Western conspiracy against Islam:

“England, and then America, wished to have control over the Islamic world, to prevent Muslim unity, and to have control of the oil resources in the Middle East. Therefore, following the Second World War, they established an artificial, false and fictitious state called Israel in this region…They mobilised the racist Zionists, who are not accepted even by many Jews. They came to Palestine and, under the pretext of wrongs supposedly done to them during Second World War, they carried out terrorism, conspiracies, massacres and bloodshed in this region.”

Such sentiments are widespread not just in Iran but across the Middle East, thanks to years of state-sponsored propaganda along similar lines. They are hardly mood music for a revived peace process.

ENDQUOTE

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P.S. I respectfully agree

Tony Bennett

And another viewpoint worth considering, from today's Daily Mail:

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The civilian casualties are awful but Israel is fighting for its existence

'Daily Mail' 23:17pm, 3rd August 2006

Reader comments so far (66)

[PICTURE: A man carries the body of his nephew from the rubbble in Baalbek following an air strike]

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There's no doubt that Israel is losing the propaganda war. You don't have to be a paid-up peacenik to find some of the pictures coming out of the Middle East distressing. No one with an iota of humanity wants to see the corpses of women and children caught up in the conflict.

[See also...
• Israel: Did Blair know all along?
• Blair 'should send sons to war'
• Darkest day yet for Israel as death toll climbs]

But you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist, either, to wonder how many of the male 'civilians' killed by the Israelis are actually Hezbollah terrorists or whether everything we're being shown from Lebanon is for real.

Islamonazis are sophisticated propagandists and they know they'll find a gullible audience in the civilised world for their carefully-strewn teddy bears, strategically-placed 'Baby Milk Factory' signs (in English) and wailing widows from central casting.

Have you ever noticed how every time a coalition air strike goes astray in Iraq, it always manages to hit a 'wedding party'?

Why is there only ever one child's shoe in the rubble, never a pair? There always seems to be a broken medicine box, too, with a handy red cross - never a red crescent, mind you - on the lid, just in case we haven't got the message.

Credulous CNN correspondents and handwringing BBC reporters fall over themselves to sign up for the Hezbollah guided tour of the ruins.

I use a rough rule of thumb whenever I watch television coverage of the Middle East. Anyone who pronounces Hezbollah as 'Hiz-bull-arrrgh' and Israeli as 'Izza-ra-ay-lee' is almost certainly telling lies.

The bien-pensant buzzword used to describe Israel's bombing is 'disproportionate'. But what's 'proportionate'? Are the thousands of rockets fired at genuine civilian targets in Israel 'proportionate'?

It is only because Israelis are hunkered down in underground shelters built out of necessity and bitter experience, or have fled out of range of Hezbollah's salvoes, that there haven't been piles of bodies on their side of the border.

What would 'world opinion' consider an acceptable death toll before acknowledging Israel's right to retaliation and self-defence - 1,000? 10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000?

Hezbollah has started a war it knows it can't win in the certain knowledge that there will be civilian casualties. Its stated aim is to kill as many Israelis as possible and if innocent Lebanese get caught in the crossfire, tough.

These fanatics have little or no regard for human life. Their tactic is to hide among civilians; to use terrified women and children as human shields; to deploy school playgrounds as rocket launch sites; hotels and apartment blocks as command centres; homes as weapons dumps; mosques as air-raid shelters.

I've heard reporters referring to Hezbollah as a 'resistance' movement. They love it, don't they? Just as they insist on calling terrorist murderers 'radicals' or 'militants' - as if there's no difference between Al Qaeda and Aslef train drivers on unofficial strike.

What they never point out is that if Hezbollah didn't exist, there would be nothing to resist. Israel is the Tony Martin of the Middle East, lashing out in fear and frustration after enduring years of provocation.

Just as Tony Martin was abandoned by the police to endure burglary after burglary at his remote farmhouse, so the 'international community' has done nothing to disarm and disband Hezbollah or prevent it and Hamas repeatedly attacking Israel.

The United Nations hasn't lifted a finger to stop Iran and Syria supporting and supplying a standing terrorist army in Lebanon. There are no sanctions against the barking mad president of Iran when he constantly threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the earth and is hell-bent on obtaining nuclear weapons.

Iran has put Lebanese civilians in the front line of its lunatic war against Israel and the U.S. in particular and Western civilisation in general. So where's the international condemnation?

Hezbollah is the provisional wing of Iran. Would it be 'proportionate' if Israel attacked the paymasters and ringleaders of Hezbollah in Tehran?

It may yet come to that. But first Israel has to remove the immediate threat to its security.

The United Nations isn't going to do that. The UN is a busted flush, led by the laughable Kofi Annan - the Chauncey Gardiner of world diplomacy. When it left the U.S.-led coalition to go it alone in Iraq, it sent a clear message to other tyrants and rogue states that they had nothing to fear from the UN.

Listening to 'world opinion' has got Israel nowhere. It was told it should trade land for peace. So it did. It got war. Israel pulled out of southern Lebanon six years ago. Hezbollah boasts that it has spent that time preparing for this fresh assault, building tunnels and bunkers and stockpiling a deadly arsenal of 13,000 weapons, which it is now raining down on Israeli civilians.

There are hourly calls for a ceasefire, but when Tel Aviv suspended bombing for 48 hours the response was a record number of Katyusha rockets fired into Israel in return.

I saw a BBC reporter standing on a hillside trying to convince us that because missiles were still being fired from Lebanon despite three weeks of fighting, it was evidence that Israel's tactics weren't working and it couldn't win.

Hezbollah has spent six years building up its arsenal in preparation for this war. Who said an Israeli victory would only take three weeks?

If there is a ceasefire, Hezbollah will simply regroup. There's talk of a negotiated settlement, but how do you cut a deal when one side says it will not be satisfied until the other is totally eradicated?

Lasting peace has only ever followed total victory in war. Even if Israel and Hezbollah/Iran agree to walk away tomorrow, we'll be back here again in a few years.

Then there's the Palestinian question. Again, even though Israel ceded territory in pursuit of peace, terror attacks and kidnappings on Israeli soil have continued.

There's talk about dusting off the old 'road map'. Israel accepts there will have to be a two-state solution, but the only 'road map' of the Middle East its enemies will accept is one without Israel on it at all.

Meanwhile, spare a thought for the Jewish community in Britain. They're as distressed by the carnage as the rest of us and there are divisions over Israel's actions. No one wallows in the death of innocents - except, of course, Hezbollah and its Iranian puppet-masters.

THIS time of year, there are 15,000 British Jewish teenagers in Israel on the traditional summer rite of passage. And there are 30,000 British passport holders living in Israel.

Although we had wall-to-wall coverage of grumbling British passport holders being evacuated from Beirut, there doesn't seem to have been equal concern about our fellow citizens under bombardment on the other side of the border.

What struck me about the recent pro-Israel demonstration in London was the number of Union flags in the crowd. These are our people.

I didn't notice any Union flags at the Stop The War rally, though there were plenty of 'We Are All Hezbollah Now' banners. It doesn't seem to dawn on them that if you want to stop the war you've got to stop Hezbollah.

But what drives most of these 'peace campaigners' is not so much a desire for peace as a hatred of Israel.

Every time something goes off in Iraq we're told it will radicalise young Muslims back in Britain. We hear that Tony Blair's failure to call for an immediate halt to the Israeli offensive has put us at imminent risk of another Islamist homicide attack on our streets.

Despite the Hezbollah war on Israel and the mounting casualties - and the widespread condemnation of Israel in this country - I've yet to hear anyone warn that young British Jews are queueing to blow up themselves and hundreds of others at Brent Cross shopping centre.

I repeat, this war is awful. The civilian deaths are a tragedy.

But there won't be peace in the Middle East until the likes of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas recognise Israel's right to exist.

And, I'm afraid, this side of kingdom come, that just ain't gonna happen.

Israel may be losing the propaganda war, but it isn't fighting a propaganda war - it's fighting a real war for its very existence.

[Add your comment | View all Reader comments (66 people have commented on this story so far. Tell us what you think below].

Here's a sample of the latest comments published. You can click view all to read all comments that readers have sent in.

QUOTE

Thank you for a refreshingly honest commentary. Your article gives me hope.

There is no moral equivalence between the actions of the IDF and those of Hezbollah. Sometimes, I wonder what would happen if the media reported the true depravity of Hezbollah's "tactics" (i.e. using women as human shields, hospitals as command HQs). Would anyone, except the most self-loathing liberal support these barbarians?

- Jeff, Washington, DC

UNQUOTE

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QUOTE

I was brought to tears by somebody actually talking sence at last. I am a Jewess and as upset about the loss of life on both sides as most people but Israel is right, it has to protect itself and its people and this is all its wants to achieve, its not looking for good publicity.

- Ruth Sloane, London, England

UNQUOTE

Axos

"We"
I don't know if you were there or not, they all appear to be the same type: vile as buckets of filth without actually being one of the evil Islamic terroists they praise. The type reminded me of this big, sweaty fat guy that keeps coming to my house and knocking on the door, carrying a big brown envelope, every day, once he came three times, and had a scrote with him, but he doesn't come any more I think he realised he is wasting his time, anyway, we look at him on the CTV monitor and laugh. I think he is trying to deliver something. The house in question is pretty high up, about 4 flights of stairs, so at least the excercise will do him good.

I go to all the anti-freedom/terrorist sopporters, rallies with friends, we have an obligation to humanity to film the scum, show what kind of degenerate wants to wipe out Jews on behalf of mass murdering islamicists. Zionist isn't a dirty word, so you will get nowhere with that tactic. I guess you believe labeling someone a zionist is going to bring downs some sort of mob wrath on me.

__________________
Israel, be strong and of good courage!

Axos

I enjoyed reading your post Keith Hand. The observations found in the comments you provided show a promising and honest stab at the truth for once. The 'anti-war' terrorist mongers may have the BBC on their side but they ain't fooling any one.

__________________
Israel, be strong and of good courage!

ukpatriot

It read to me like the sort of thing the Stalinists etc used to say in defence of the latest pogrom.

ukpatriot

English isn't your first language is it Axos?

Mind telling us which is your mother tongue?