Of course Israel has a whole roll-call of paid spies in Gaza.

Of course they know where the tunnel entrances are.

Of course they know where the major weapons caches are.

They haven't been shooting blindly.

Lionel Edriess wrote on Aug 2^nd, 2014 at 12:09pm:


So why deny the evidence of eye witnesses? Why take part in a propaganda war when you believe that hospitals are being targeted?

This is a war with huge civilian casualties. With the exception of people like Herbie who want to see Palestinians culled, I don’t understand why any civilized person would seek to minimize or deflect from the fact that innocent people are being massacred by Israel. It’s one thing to present causes and reasons for this war, it’s another to deny that innocent people aren’t being wounded and killed in their droves.

Israel has every right to defend itself from Palestinian rockets. It doesn’t have the right to massacre an entire population. Israel is currently breaking international law and breaching UN resolutions. You might disagree with the resolutions, but no one can pretend Israel isn’t violating them.

It’s easy to play Andrew Bolt with the facts. It’s a lot harder to accept the cold hard fact that Israel is bombing hospitals and schools and killing thousands of innocent civilians as we speak.

Eye-witness accounts carry a lot more weight than the views of columnists in the Australian. In an age of information/propaganda, one of the biggest problems we face is that facts and opinion are reversed. This leads to the problems Aquascoot described - an inability to empathize with fellow humans. It’s how the Holocaust was allowed to happen, and today, it’s how new crimes against humanity are excused, deflected and abstracted out of all proportion.

Karnal wrote on Aug 2^nd, 2014 at 2:20pm:



Karmal, i listened to a christian in iraq this morning talking about the genocide of christians , the destruction of churches, the attempt to wipe out a history that goes back 1800 years (i hadnt been aware that iraq had several million christians).
This was the first time i'd ever heard a media story on this .

If we compare the media coverage on the gaza situation, it is saturation coverage, it is relentless, it has been going on , as far as i can remember since i was at school.

I think the media can lead to a type of "compassion fatigue, or compassion burnout"

The KONI story was wildly popular on social media a year or so ago. now it seems totally forgotten. the punters have a type of ADD, its hard to hold their attention for long.

Does media saturation that goes on for years really do 
a cause good.  Perhaps it does.
it does seem a little unfair to me.

The daniel morcombe case being a classic media  craze that really took off.
red shirt days, lighting brisbane bridges red, daniel on milk cartons, daniel on the sides of buses.  to me it seemed too much focus on one case and it seemed to  be unfair to the other 20,000 missing people in OZ.
24 detectives worked the case , non stop for 12 years.  i remember someone bringing up an aboriginal boy who went missing the same day as daniel. the police did no more than file a missing person report. his body was found a year later weighed down with stones in a Qld river. no taskforce, no conviction, no media frenzy.
to me, that stinks.

and to me, for the media to be in a frenzy over gaza stinks as well.  it is unfair on all the suffering going on elsewhere . the palestinians have running water, schools , hospitals, billions in aid.
Lets have some equal coverage of the people in ethiopia , nigeria, i believe the war in algeria has reflared.   lets not have the gazans as the total focus of world media attention. i feel it detracts from other people who could use our aid and would probably use it much better.
I hear the USA is to spend another 500 million re-equipping the dome shield for the israelis. think how much suffering that could relive in sub saharan africa.  but it wont.  No media there, no media = not worthy of comapssion it seems.

Laugh till you cry wrote on Aug 2^nd, 2014 at 3:23pm:



I think Hamas is firing rockets to deliberately get hit back by the Jews.

This is to show wounded children on TV & win the propaganda war.

Bobby. wrote on Aug 2^nd, 2014 at 3:28pm:




a war of propaganda... are you serious bobby??.. have you watched the news..?.. the Gaza is almost flat...

Israel is a BIG COUNTRY it has lots of money and lots of weapons the Hamas are like a flea on a dog...

and they are fighting a very BIG UGLY DOG....so you had better believe this isnt propaganda...Israel has had a gutfull... they have sent warnings they do not pretend to turn a blind eye.. then bang your dead....

they go about it very matter of fact.... they are prepared to live with the enemy....they even employed the Palestinians who crossed the border every day....no trouble... unless they had a bomb strapped on them...come on its stupid to claim its only the Israelis that are the aggressors.

Karnal wrote on Aug 2^nd, 2014 at 2:20pm:


I am not partaking in a propaganda war, I am merely supplying what little information is available when I make a quick Google search in order to reply to questions in a timely manner. I maintain no database to justify my assertions or back my opinions. What facts I am able to glean, at present, are what is available at the present point in time.

The facts speak for themselves. Innocent people have, once again, become collateral damage in a war that has lasted for decades. Israel, once again, has responded with force to deliberate provocation. Perhaps rightly so.

Karnal wrote on Aug 2^nd, 2014 at 2:20pm:


I am not denying that innocent people are being killed, rather that the numbers are not "huge", that Israel is not "massacring"  innocent people and that the 'propaganda' regarding this conflict is decidedly one-sided. The causes and reasons for this war have been writ large and a long time ago.

Karnal wrote on Aug 2^nd, 2014 at 2:20pm:


There you have it, right there. I agree with you.

Karnal wrote on Aug 2^nd, 2014 at 2:20pm:


Again, I agree with you. However, I don't agree that this is one of their ambitions and that this conflict is about that. What you are describing is genocide and I firmly believe that the Jews of all nations have vivid memories of an earlier campaign directed against themselves and would not allow even the most extreme elements of their religion to carry out such a program.

Their opponents, on the other hand, appear to be not so squeamish. If fact, they themselves are in breach of the international codes of war and their co-religionists are involved in many similar campaigns right across the globe. They also display the same sort of disregard for the impact of their actions on their own people. Collateral damage seems to be an acceptable price for the furtherance of their ambitions.

Karnal wrote on Aug 2^nd, 2014 at 2:20pm:


Whether or not Israel is in breach of international law will be decided at some future date. At present, intervention seems to be in the hands of the diplomats - which offers no chance of a speedy solution or any diminution of the casualties on both sides.

I don't deny that Israel has targeted schools, private homes and now hospitals. You must ask yourself why they consider this necessary. When you consider your reply, you must also consider what, seemingly, has been discovered in such environs.

aquascoot wrote on Aug 2^nd, 2014 at 3:19pm:


Anyone else here behind the times?

" ... Most people in the West would be surprised by the answer to the question: who are the most persecuted people in the world? According to the International Society for Human Rights, a secular group with members in 38 states worldwide, 80 per cent of all acts of religious discrimination in the world today are directed at Christians.

The Centre for the Study of Global Christianity in the United States estimates that 100,000 Christians now die every year, targeted because of their faith – that is 11 every hour. The Pew Research Center says that hostility to religion reached a new high in 2012, when Christians faced some form of discrimination in 139 countries, almost three-quarters of the world's nations. ... "

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/christians-the-worlds-most-persecute...

While lamentable, this current conflict is about more than just Gaza and Palestinians.

Where's the outrage now?

Laugh till you cry wrote on Aug 2^nd, 2014 at 3:23pm:


That's quite interesting. Can you provide a link to that story. The only reference I can find to Gaza Uni being bombed is from 2008.

Yadda wrote on Aug 2^nd, 2014 at 4:40pm:


And yet, Palestinian children don’t vote.

Nor did the children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Your replies are no more than abstractions. This is a war, and it needs to end.