Two armed Jewish settlers shot dead in West Bank

by Bearla Fri Aug 02, 2002 01:36

Pat,your ravings in this site are an insult to the good name of the Irish people."The martyr who was armed only with a knife showed great bravery in penetrating a zionist armed camp. His memory will live on in the hearts of the palestinian people."-Your "brave martyr" invaded a house at night and tried to murder a sleeping married couple.I see no bravery in such a heinous act of terror.How this attack helped the Palestinian people is beyond me.If you consider this man as someone who should be remembered than I pity you .

by pat c Thu Aug 01, 2002 13:18

more zionist crap. those two brothers were armed settlers who had gotten their route after the IDF had prevented palestinians from supplying the area.

the martyr who was armed only with a knife showed great bravery in penetrating a zionist armed camp. his memory will live on in the hearts of the palestinian people.

by Ta Se anseo Thu Aug 01, 2002 01:14

These killers are neither hopeless nor victims.
By Michael Gove, The Times (London), June 25, 2002

Jack Straw takes his cue from John Donne. Asked by The Times last week what lesson could be drawn from the killing of 20 Israelis by a Palestinian terrorist, the Foreign Secretary invited observers to feel "a degree of compassion" for suicide bombers. Any man-s death diminishes me, Donne wrote, because I am involved in mankind.

My colleague Matthew Parris takes his cue from another poet. In seeking to argue that there was something "ennobling" in the suicide bombers- self-sacrifice, he quoted from Horace "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori". Both Parris and the Foreign Secretary are seeking to do what a certain type of civilised Englishman has long sought to do in the face of wickedness - bring the protagonists within the pale of civilised understanding.

They, and Cherie Blair, urge us to feel the suicide bombers- pain. Consider yourself without hope, and imagine to what ends you might be driven.

The cumulative effect of these interventions has been to make the "desperation" which "drives" these bombers to blow themselves up the central question for observers of the conflict in the Middle East. How, we are invited to ask, can we remove the "hopelessness" which leads to "self-sacrifice"? Powerful as this line of argument can be, it is also a profound, and dangerous, moral evasion.

What these arguments evade is the reality of the bombers- motivation.

Their acts are not expressions of despair or hopelessness, "cries for help" as the West has come to understand suicide. Nor are they the noble stands of outnumbered warriors, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, or Samson in the Temple. They are the calculated acts of men and women whose ideology celebrates death in a fashion which almost defies Western comprehension.

Indeed, these acts are designed to elicit compassion in the West for the killers, a sentiment which the bombers know undermines the West-s capacity to resist barbarism.

The terrorist responsible for the bus bombing which killed 20 Israelis last Wednesday, Mohammed al-Ghoul, was explicit in his motivation. "How beautiful it is to make my bomb shrapnel kill the enemy," he wrote immediately before he did just that, "how beautiful it is to kill and be killed." These are not the words of one in despair, but on the verge of exultation.

Al-Ghoul was not a wretched, hopeless, outcast but a student pursuing a master-s degree in Islamic studies. His act was not a cry for help but the culminating affirmation of an ideology which holds sway in the Palestinian Authority and other centres of Islamist fundamentalism across the world. It is an ideology inculcated in children from their earliest years.

At a recent "graduation exercise" in a Gaza kindergarten children burnt an Israeli flag and a young girl had her hands dipped in red paint to celebrate the lynching of two Israeli soldiers.
Another child dressed as the Hamas leader, Hassan Nasrallah, recited lines praising Hezbollah for its fight against the Israelis, a struggle that would win rewards "from above". Other children carried toy rifles.

What, I wonder, is "ennobling" about such a ceremony?
There is a moral gulf of almost unbridgeable proportions between the stand which we in the West can admire, of taking one's life in one's hands against formidable odds, the stand of the rearguard action, of Horatio on the bridge or the Coldstreamers at Dunkirk, and the deliberate grooming of kindergarten children for their place in a death cult.

This culture of death has not taken root in an arid desert of despair but a land irrigated by outside money.
EU cash has helped to fund an education system which twists minds with anti-Jewish propaganda.
The Saudis and Iraqis have created a perverted "welfare" system which rewards the families of suicide bombers with significant wealth.

The Palestinian Authority has used its autonomy, and the period of negotiation which followed the Oslo agreement, to build an infrastructure. It is not, however, one of a state pledged to peace, but a society configured to kill. Both its Jewish neighbours and its own.

This ideology of death is not then the product of hope denied, but hope fed. Fed not just by money and arms from neighbours, but fed, above all, by the folly of the West. The hope that terror will bring concessions, the hope that the West is weakening, the hope that fanaticism will prevail, is daily reinforced.
That hope is nurtured by movement towards a Palestinian state which is accelerated, not delayed, by bombing. It is encouraged by news that decisive action against one sponsor of terror, Iraq, has been delayed. It is supported by news that the world's most energetic sponsor of terror, Iran, is to be appeased by the granting of EU trade privileges.

It is also advanced by the moral confusion which suicide bombing has produced among Western elites. The campaign has been designed to obscure the wickedness of ethnic mass murder by seeking to place the killer on the same moral plain as his targets - both are to be seen as "victims".

But that is only true in the sense that a Khmer Rouge, Waffen SS or Interahamwe footsoldier and those he slaughters are "equally" victims of totalitarianism. One is implementing an ideology of death, the others are that ideology's necessary sacrifices.
To contextualise the acts of the killers by arguing that they have no hope, to see "nobility" in their blitheness about the consequences as they take others' lives, is to locate moral reasoning in individuals who wish to erase the most fundamental moral principle - respect for life itself.

It is difficult for the civilised man or woman to admit that barbarism can take possession of a soul, or a society. But unless we do, we cannot stop its advance.

by Des Thu Aug 01, 2002 00:09

Evil?, what the hell do you call dropping a bomb from an F-16 on a crowded apartment complex, certainly Ariel thought it was a great success, which says a lot about who the people of Israel elected as their prime minister. I regret the death of any human being regardless of nationality, however the deaths of Palestinian people and children and BABIES, now that's really evil. The so called "settlers" are illegally occupying Palestinian land, seized by force and can not be regarded as civilians.

by Anamachea Wed Jul 31, 2002 23:09

"Two heavily armed Jewish settlers have been shot dead in the West Bank."-You failed to mention that the "heavily armed settlers" were murdered while delivering fuel to the Palestinians.The two brothers were killed in cold blood while driving into an Arab village to deliver diesel fuel to the Palestinians.The terrorists opened fire at their truck from long range and then continued shooting from close range.It is still not clear whether the ambush was planned after local Palestinians told the terrorists of the brothers' regular routine, or the brothers just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Shlomo and Mordechai Odesser were in the area to deliver fuel to a factory between Zeita and Jama'in at the request of a well known Palestinian customer.The brothers had distributed fuel in the area as part of their job.

"Earlier, Israeli troops killed a Palestinian (armed only with a knife)who broke into a Jewish settlement, south of Nablus and stabbed an armed settler. "-A terrorist invaded a house at night and while David Mimran, 44, and his wife Orna, 40
were sleeping the terrorist started to stab David.
David woke up only as the terrorist stabbed him,and he obviously wasn't armed.
The wife woke up and saw her husband fighting the terrorist and se tried to grab his knives after startling him from behind.Te terrorist was holding the knives so tightly it was impossible to wrest them from his grasp. He weakened as her husband tried to choke him and and she pushed the knives into his face, wounding him.The couple had knocked him out and Orna run outside to call for help.Outside, she flagged down an army jeep, yelling, "there are terrorists," and Israeli soldiers searched for the still alive terrorist and finally killed him.I wonder what would you do if someone invades your house and stab you while you're at bed sleeping?
The only place suitable for people like you who support terrorists and distort the facts is the parades in Gaza celebrating the murder of five foreigners and two Israelis at the Hebrew University.