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Are they committing acts of terrorism, or do they just say things you don't like?
Hamas invaded Israel 2023
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Eaglelord17
Army.ca Veteran
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‘ In Canada, section 83.01 of the Criminal Code[1] defines terrorism as an act committed "in whole or in part for a political, religious or ideological purpose, objective or cause" with the intention of intimidating the public "…with regard to its security, including its economic security, or compelling a person, a government or a domestic or an international organization to do or to refrain from doing any act." Activities recognized as criminal within this context include death and bodily harm with the use of violence; endangering a person’s life; risks posed to the health and safety of the public; significant property damage; and interference or disruption of essential services, facilities or systems.’
I am pretty sure driving people from their home and killing them if they resist for a religious ideology based solely on the other people not being the right ethnicity and religion qualify.
Colin Parkinson
Army.ca Myth
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From 1967 till 2005 it was the Settlers that created a lot of the jobs (for Palestinians) in Gaza and then were forced off the land by the Israeli government in the name of peace. I suspect they are having a "Told you so" moment and are rubbing salt into the government wounds. It's very unlikely the government would allow them into Gaza. My guess is the real play here is for more land in the WB and political pressure to reduce Palestinian independence there. Israel and the PA are fighting a demographic war there and the Settles as I recall are one of the few populations within Israel that have a birthrate that can compete with the Palestinians.
I like what Tom Nash suggest is going to happen in Gaza long term. Which is 5 Cantons run by powerful Palestinian families who apparently the Israeli's are giving the aid to, so they can distribute it and give them power and influence for the long term under the watchful eye of the IDF who will have free reign in Gaza.
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She's not doing that though... she's just saying she'd like to. Even the clearly slanted article admits it's not going to happen.
You want to be declared a terrorist for your thought crimes?
RangerRay
Army.ca Veteran
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The Line on that shitshow in Parliament last week. Israel DAF about “our” feelings.
www.readtheline.ca
Dispatch from the Front Lines: Cosplaying as the country we once were
"What do you mean you can't afford rent? The economy is thriving. Stop reading disinformation, you ungrateful proto-fascist.”
www.readtheline.ca
Let it never be said that your Lineeditors are not receptive to the wishes of you, our paying readers. We’d gotten a few emails over the past few weeks asking us our thoughts on the Israel-Hamas conflict, which we had covered extensively, but less so lately.
The simple truth is, we weren’t sure there was much value in a weekly comment to the effect of: the war continues, and it is terrible. We’ve limited ourselves more to commentary on and analysis of how the war is shaping our domestic politics and society. It seemed the better use of our time.
On that front, we couldn’t help but roll our eyes this week at the political grandstanding around the NDP’s proposed motion on recognizing Palestine as a state. We felt that that was dumb. Palestine isn’t a state. We want it to be one, one day, but it isn’t, today. The Palestinian people have two states — a semi-functional West Bank run by largely despised corrupt autocrats, and a network of terror tunnels built under a bomb crater in Gaza. Recognizing that as a state today is the most pointless of symbolic gestures, which probably goes most of the way to explaining why the NDP was so enamoured with the idea.
The Liberals, to our view, handled the issue fairly well, politically. That’s the part they’re good at. They negotiated the NDP’s proposal down to a series of statements that basically simply reiterated what Canadian policy already is and then voted in favour of the status quo. Then they all hugged. A dramatic and then celebrated vote in favour of the status quo by Liberals and New Democrats is maybe not the best optic for either of them, but hey.
Pragmatically, of course, it was an exercise in stupidity. To the extent there was anything new, such as the decision to suspend weapon exports to Israel, the Liberals rapidly discovered that they had beclowned themselves: Canada isn’t exporting weapons to Israel, which our own government seemed not to realize until they announced that we would stop. Israel exports military technology to us, though — or did. Stay tuned, we guess.
We chided the NDP above for their love of useless symbolism, and regret to report that this is a weakness shared by our Liberals, who — in extremely typical fashion — were so seized with the urgent need to be seen doing something that they didn’t take the 45 seconds necessary to discover that we were committing ourselves to stop doing something we weren’t actually doing.
Canadian foreign policy under Trudeau in a nutshell, that. Why do a thing when you can just pledge to not do a thing you’re already not doing?
Canada Is Back™.
The absurdity of it all was really captured by a comment by NDP MP Heather McPherson, the party’s foreign affairs critic and one of the authors of the original NDP motion. She met with pro-Palestinian activists after the vote, and then sadly told reporters after, “I'm not going to lie. I wish that I could have delivered to them statehood for Palestinian people.”
Well, gee, Heather, you hard-headed realist and obviously very serious person, you. Maybe if you’d just tried harder, you — a member of the fourth-largest party in the Canadian parliament, who clearly stands astride the world like some kind of diplomatic colossus — would have been able to take Palestinian statehood, deposit it in a lovely wicker basket, throw in some chocolate and jars of olives and maybe a candle, smother it all in those little strips of paper, and then hand-deliver it personally to the people of Gaza. Ta da! Statehood!
Way to let them down, ma’am.
Good Lord. Like what can we say in the face of that level of delusional self-regard? This is the kind of deep-thinking that animates the NDP and that the Liberals need to placate. Makes you feel good about how things are going in Ottawa, eh?
More seriously: Many Jewish Canadians were disappointed by the vote, and we get that. But this was inevitable. The political centre-of-gravity on this was always going to pull Justin Trudeau in this direction. We are weirdly impressed, in a way, that it took this long. This is another kick in the gut for many Canadian Jews, who remain alarmed not just by the protests and criminal violence directed at them and their cultural and religious sites, but especially the manifest refusal of police to protect them. We wish we had words of reassurance to offer. We don’t.
That covers off the latest at home. What about the war itself?
Sigh. Go freshen your drink, friends.
We understand that the destruction in Gaza and the loss of civilian life, particularly of children, has proven too much for some to bear, pushing them to now believe that a ceasefire is necessary, so as to avoid further destruction and loss.
Sure. We get it. We expected it. Any halfway informed observer understood that Israel’s public support would diminish with time as the war ground on. As for us at The Line, our position hasn’t changed. We continue to support the war and its aims. This should not be — it will be, we know, but it should not be — interpreted as some carte blanche approval of Benjamin Netanyahu or a declaration of Israel perfection. Far from it. We do not condone all that Israel has done, and we are no fans of Netanyahu. Rather, we are simply saddened to report that thus far, the war has proceeded generally as we expected. That’s why the compounding horrors of the last few months haven’t moved our opinion. They were baked in, as it were.
Seriously, folks. Why do you think we were so glum in the immediate aftermath of the attack on Israel? Some of it was obviously the tremendous depravity of the attack itself and all the suffering it caused. But a lot of it was also the certainty that Israel was going to drop the gloves and do everything it could to finish the job this time, civilian casualties be damned. Israel wasn’t going to launch a surgical operation aimed at materially degrading Hamas’s rocket force over the medium term, it was going to wage war to destroy totally destroy Hamas as an organization.
We understood that on the first day, and also understood what that was going to look like. Some of you, seemingly, did not.
Indeed, before Israel’s main attack began, Line editor Gurney sketched out during an interview with broadcaster Charles Adler what such a campaign would likely look like, using nothing more than broad historical comparisons and military rules of thumb. Gurney estimated that civilian deaths would be at least in the 30,000-50,000 range, because, typically, a trained military force attacking an enemy force inside an urban area has inflicted somewhere between 10 to 0.5 civilian casualties for every enemy combatant killed.
That’s a hugely broad range, we grant, but that’s what history tells us. Indeed, Gaza would normally be expected to be on the higher range of that scale — it is densely populated and there is nowhere for the civilian population to evacuate: a worst-case scenario for collateral damage. Hamas had a pre-war fighting strength of an estimated 30,000-40,000. Killing half, an approximate minimum traditionally required to render a military force combat ineffective, would accordingly mean killing 15,000-20,000 terrorists.
Do the math. The expected range of civilian casualties was therefore anywhere from 7,500 to 200,000.
The estimated total death toll in Gaza is, to date, between 30,000 and 35,000. That’s likely an undercount, but it’s the available figure, so we’ll run with it. Some of those are undoubtedly Hamas terrorists; Israel claims that it has killed at least 10,000. We don’t automatically accept that number, but just for the sake of argument, let’s run with that one, too. That leaves us with 20,000-25,000 civilian dead. The keen reader will note that that is closer to the lower end of the range, despite Gaza being an environment where we’d expect the civilian losses to be on the high end.
This is why we scoff at the accusations of genocide. Westerners have truly forgotten what war — real wars, not little police actions or brushfire conflicts — looks like. It looks like Gaza today.
We know the above analysis will be off-putting to many. It’s cold and clinical. We can only repeat that we are not immune to the sadness and horror many feel. But war is as much about numbers as anything, and these are the numbers.
Will Israel succeed? We don’t know. We hope so. But we sure as hell appreciate that tut-tutting from the sidelines wasn’t going to be a deterrent. And for those newly among the “Ceasefire now!” chorus, you have every right to your moral convictions, but if that isn’t balanced with an understanding of why Israel DGAF about your feelings, we don’t know what to tell you.
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Bunch of dead/displaced arabs might have an opinion.
Quirky
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UN continues it's irrelevance with meaningless resolutions.
www.ctvnews.ca
UN demands ceasefire in Gaza during Muslim holy month of Ramadan, its 1st demand to halt fighting
The United Nations Security Council has demanded a ceasefire in Gaza during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, its first demand to halt fighting.
Eaglelord17
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Considering 1) they are doing it right now in the West Bank, it isn’t a maybe. This would just be a expansion of their practices. And 2) since when did we get so tolerant of genocide?
What they advocate isn’t far off to what the Germans advocated just prior to WWII. Read the stages of the Holocaust to understand that where these settlers are at is just under start sending them to concentration camps.
As to your thought crime argument, advocating genocide in Canada has been a crime for a long time. This meets the criteria.
These are terrorists, and even worse than most, they are state sanctioned ones. Israel needs to get a grip on them, or the rest of the world needs to make them a pariah to understand that those acts aren’t acceptable.
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You are missing a large point.
Why do Israelis feel the need to expand and push Palestinians out…
When everyone is out to get you, it’s not paranoia.
Eaglelord17
Army.ca Veteran
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That still doesn’t mean you can commit genocide.
You could also state why do the Palestinians feel the need to push the Israelis out? Its a chicken and egg type scenario. Its only going to stop when both sides are making efforts for it to stop. Israel actively expanding isn’t acting in good faith.
daftandbarmy
Army.ca Dinosaur
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Palestinian govt? Which one or which of the armed factions is running the show? Think Abdul on the street is more interested in living his life w/o all the politics etc.
OldSolduer
Army.ca Relic
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Colin Parkinson
Army.ca Myth
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The palestinians want all of the land that makes up Israel. They will not stop till every Jew is gone or dead. They have stated this again and again and have done so since the creation of the State of Israel. They also tried to overthrow the government of Jordan (which has a population of 2/3rd Palestinian). The Israelis have no place to go and are not leaving, as they have had enough of the tender mercies of Europe.
Halifax Tar
Army.ca Fixture
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This isn't genocide.
Quirky
Army.ca Veteran
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You don't know what that word means.
OldSolduer
Army.ca Relic
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From Wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org
From the Oxford Dictionary
the deliberate killing or severe mistreatment of a large number of people from a particular national or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group
Genocide - Wikipedia
From the Oxford Dictionary
the deliberate killing or severe mistreatment of a large number of people from a particular national or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group
TacticalTea
Sr. Member
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Thinking we should just have a policy of always voting NO at the UN unless a parliamentary motion authorizes a specific YES vote.UN continues it's irrelevance with meaningless resolutions.
UN demands ceasefire in Gaza during Muslim holy month of Ramadan, its 1st demand to halt fighting
The United Nations Security Council has demanded a ceasefire in Gaza during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, its first demand to halt fighting.
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