UK: The Telegraph Facebook Page (1)

On the Israeli pager attack on Hezbollah

One of the best anti terror strategies ever employed. The stuff of Hollywood films.

Gary Stodel It is called state terror by scholars of terrorism. There is state violence and non-state violence.

Ned Ma it's the best actors who invented today's technology playing and toying with the old technology, and the keepers thinking they are safe.

Ned Ma

Jamus Fundi That's not related to my comment. I am speaking about 'terrorism' academically, i.e. sociologically, historically, politically, etc. The key word is scholars who have written about violence and forms of violence.

Jim Braiden

Ned Ma

Terrorism is violence directed at civilians for political purposes.

This was not terrorism.

Ned Ma

Jim Braiden narrowed the definition and ignored who were killled in the attack. That suits his ideological stance towards a state that has used state terror for decades. “Webster's Collegiate Dictionary: 'Terror is an intense, overpowering fear.' Terrorism is ‘the use of terrorizing methods of governing or resisting a government.'

This simple definition has one great virtue, that of fairness. It's air. It focuses on the use of coercive violence, violence that is used illegally, extra-constitutionally, to coerce. And this definition is correct because it treats terror for what it is, whether the government or private people commit it.

“Have you noticed something?

Motivation is left out of it. We're not talking about whether the cause is just or unjust. We're talking about consensus, consent, absence of consent, legality, absence of legality, constitutionality, absence of constitutionality. Why do we keep motives out? Because motives differ. Motives differ and make no difference. The need to be heard is essential. One motivation there.

“The experience of violence by a stronger party has historically turned victims into terrorists. That's what happens to peoples and nations. When they are battered, they hit back. State terror very often breeds collective terror. If you're going to practice double standards, you will be paid with double standards. Don't use it. Don't condone Israeli terror, Pakistani terror, Nicaraguan terror, El Salvadoran terror, [British terror, US terror, Russian terror, French terror], on the one hand, and then complain about Afghan terror or Palestinian terror. It doesn't work. Try to be even-handed. A superpower cannot promote terror in one place and reasonably expect to discourage terrorism in another place.

“The moral revulsion that we must feel against terrorism is selective. We are to feel the terror of those groups, which are officially disapproved. We are to applaud the terror of those groups of whom officials do approve.”

Compare the above to what the UN analysed

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/09/exploding-pagers-and-radios-terrifying-violation-international-law-say-un

Jim Braiden

Ned Ma

A lot of verbiage to say nothing.

Terrorism in the modern political sense is the deliberate targeting of civilians for political purposes.

The motive or the cause is immaterial.

Israel has never target civilians period.

The UN ?

Seriously?

You are citing an organization whose hatred and bias against Israel is notorious.

An organization that elected a Nazi war criminal to lead it .

That refused to pass a resolution condemning the Oct 7 atrocities.

That employed 4 rabid anti Semites to “investigate “ Israel.

That has passed more resolutions condemning Israel ( a state that has never initiated a war or started a conflict) than it has against all the rest of the world combined.

The exploding pagers a violation of international law?

Seriously?

A genocidal terrorist organization fearing that its mobile phones are being tapped decides to use pagers to communicate.

The Israeli intelligence services discover the plan and arrange to sell the terrorist organization pagers with a small explosive charge hidden in them.

The terrorist organization buys the pagers .

The terrorist organization distributes the pagers to its members- all terrorists.

Israel detonates the 5000 pagers.

4998 terrorists are killed or maimed.

2 non terrorists are sadly killed.

And the UN and you say that this incredibly targeted attack on a terrorist organization violated international law.

Clear evidence that you and the UN are morally and intellectually bankrupted.

Jim Braiden

Ned Ma

Might I suggest that you read this .

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/

Oh and citing Globalresearchca?

Not a good idea.

Ned Ma

Jim Braiden Verbiage and “Israel has never target civilians period.“ I stopped there. I do not discuss with fundamentalists, and there are plenty of them here. Where is your laughing emojis?

Jim Braiden

Ned Ma

Israel has never targeted civilians period.

Prove me wrong.

Ned Ma

Jim Braiden You will always find a justification. You will also dismiss other reports by international organisations because they are against your ideological position. Israel already said that 'there was no innocent civilians'. All Palestinains are combatants in its logic. Not only you ignore what many say about an ongoing genocide, you would deny the killings of civilians in previous wars and protests (in the intifadas, in 2006 and 2008, in 2019 protests. Would you bother to look for the 200+ killed in the green march in 2019? No. Would you bother to go back to the children who used stones against tanks and got killed? No. Even those unarmed who go to collect food are shot. Your ideological stance is also to ignore armed resistance against state violence of the occupier. Oh, I don't think you even consider it occupation. The UN is not a source for you. Amnesty, HRW, UN, Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders, the Lancet, Jeffrey Sachs and John Mearsheimer (not leftists), Oxfam, Israeli writer David Grossman, Louis Theroux, the Commissioner General of UNROA… In every war there is a propaganda war. It is for you to find out, but you cannot find out if you had already taken a stance and do not want to question or even doubt. It becomes a belief rather than a fact. This is my last comment.

Jim Braiden

Ned Ma

I love the sound of Jew hating Nazi fanboys scuttling away.

Sounds like … victory.

The Qarmatians (Al-Qaramita)

By Nadeem Mahjoub Documentary film-makers G. Troeller and M. C. Defarge once asked a cabinet minister in South Yemen, why socialistic ideas were so readily acceptable in that part of the Arab world. He replied: “Because we have been communists for a thousand years! My mother was Qarmatian.” Official Muslim scholars and clerics, and many so-called moderates (whether individuals or groups) oppose sedition ( fitna ). Tensions and contradictions in society should be solved peacefully and even if the ruler was unjust and impious, it is generally accepted he should still be obeyed, for any kind of order is better than anarchy and sedition. “The tyranny of a sultan for a hundred years causes less damage than one year’s tyranny exercised by the subjects against one another.” Revolt was justified only against a ruler who clearly went against the command of God and His prophet.” 1 Here we look at not what happened in the minds of people who call for calm, oppose dissent and preach the re...

Cairo C. 1900-1934 The accurate translation for Arabic meaning of Cairo is "the invincible".

John Gray, the Guardian, 03 March 2015: "To a significant extent, the new atheism is the expression of a liberal moral panic." "There is no more reason to think science can determine human values today than there was at the time of Haeckel or Huxley. None of the divergent values that atheists have from time to time promoted has any essential connection with atheism, or with science. How could any increase in scientific knowledge validate values such as human equality and personal autonomy? The source of these values is not science. In fact, as the most widely-read atheist thinker of all time [Nietzsche] argued, these quintessential liberal values have their origins in monotheism." "The reason Nietzsche has been excluded from the mainstream of contemporary atheist thinking is that he exposed the problem atheism has with morality. It’s not that atheists can’t be moral – the subject of so many mawkish debates. The question is which morality an atheis...

Capitalism

Some of this reminds me of how five or six years ago in a class of seven students in a UK elite university three of them (two Germans and one British) were in favour of a "benevolent dictator" (in the Arab context). The bloody horrors of Pinochet showed how capitalism will react when it's threatened

Varoufakis "speaks of how great it was to have the support of Larry Summers, Norman Lamont, and other figures on the Right, but it was support for whom, for what, and in whose class interests? Class analysis is far from the foreground of the picture sketched out here. Closed rooms and class war

"A second position argues against transition, which is transitology itself. It is well known—especially among economists—as the sudden mobilization of a considerable mass of experts who are generally foreigners,generally Western, who come to preach the good word and to propose ready-made models of democracy. The science of the transition has become a financial windfall, a market. And the word transition has of course become a reflex of language, a term of reference, a call for tenders ( appel d’offres ) to which the whole society was supposed to respond. Consequently, the reticence that one can express is the following: our history is framed, transition is a heteronomy. Every democratic revolution is henceforth supposed to take a unique, imposed path, which is, at the same time, indistinctly democratic and liberal (or neoliberal). A more or less non-“negotiable” package. It is necessary to highlight the imposed character (and imposed from the outside) of this coming to t...

"By 2003, the Libyan government had entered into relations with the International Monetary Fund, privatizing a number of state-owned enterprises. In 2004, Libya opened up 15 new offshore and onshore blocs to drilling. Campbell also chronicles the burrowing actions of the “Western-educated bureaucrats [who] worked to bring Libya into the fold of ‘market reforms,’ and the deepening commercial relations with British capital.” In 2007, British Petroleum inked a deal with the Libyan Investment Corporation for the exploration of 54,000 square kilometers of the Ghadames and Sirt basins. It also signed training agreements for Libyan professionals, helping create a base for neoliberalism within the government. By 2011, 2800 Libyan professionals were studying in the United Kingdom, learning “Western values” of destatization and thus the removal of the possibility for production and power to be responsive to the demands of the people. Libya under Qadhaffi was mercurial, but against ...

Europe's Refugee Camps

"Just three and a half years after the signing of the refugee deal, these camps have become symbols of Europe's failure to protect those who knocked on its door for help. These camps, with Moria chief among them, are now places where already traumatised people are stripped off their dignity." The invisible violence of Europe's refugees camps

"Egypt is no longer the heart of the Arab world"

NM's blog

Search This Blog