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...

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

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

"If you don't attack the economic power of the elite, soon or later it will attack you." That's what the Arab uprisings, for instance, were unable/failed to do. K for Karl – Revolution (episode 3)

"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...

"In the same way that Robinson [Crusoe] was able to obtain a sword, we can just as well suppose that [Man] Friday might appear one fine morning with a loaded revolver in his hand, and from then on the whole relationship of violence is reversed: Man Friday gives the orders and Crusoe is obliged to work. . . . Thus, the revolver triumphs over the sword, and even the most childish believer in axioms will doubtless form the conclusion that violence is not a simple act of will, but needs for its realization certain very concrete preliminary conditions, and in particular the implements of violence; and the more highly developed of these implements will carry the day against primitive ones. Moreover, the very fact of the ability to produce such weapons signifies that the producer of highly developed weapons, in everyday speech the arms manufacturer, triumphs over the producer of primitive weapons. To put it briefly, the triumph of violence depends upon the production of a...

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

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

US

Written in June: The candidate who emerged from this jumble of discontent was the man who promised to do the least. His party is now preparing to give us a national election that will be little more than a referendum on the hated Donald Trump. Finally we have a climate in which the American public would unquestionably choose dramatic change were it offered to them, and the party of change has contrived to ensure that it will not be offered. Instead our choice is between two elderly and conservative white men, both with a history of stretching the truth, both with sexual harassment accusations hanging over them, and neither representing any possibility of energetic democratic reform. The old order has been miraculously rescued once again. Such is the climate of opinion in America that, with the right leader, remarkable things would be possible. Instead we are presented with Joe Biden, an affable DC veteran with a hand in many of the defining disasters of the last 30 years: worker-c...

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