Massacre in Gaza: Israeli strikes kill more than 200

What a clown. 

Sure, I am angry at your idiotic and contradictory and stupid statments, and your flat distortions of what I have said.

And here we go again, starting with "forget the ideological debate" and then following with the hope that they "develop their own leadershp", which is (according to you) is "currently non-existent", expressed in the most cloying and maudlin tones. What could be more ideological than denying the very existance of the Hamas leadership that was duly elected to office by popular vote? What is your problem? Is it that you can't reconcile your own need to preach socialism to the heathen Muslims, with the principles you are preaching, one of which is no doubt the "right of self-determination."

I would say that the Palestinian people expressed their "aspirations" when 46 percent of them voted to elect Hamas as their government. Your problem is that you just can't swallow it. But Unionist will work for "their cause" here in Canada by denying the validity of their votes.

Emergency demo in Vancouver on Monday, against Israeli War Crimes.

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PROTEST ISRAELI WAR CRIMES
Monday December 29th @ Noon
US Consulate (1075 West Pender)
Gather on HASTINGS side (corner Thurlow)

Organized by various Palestinian solidarity groups.
Endorsed by:
Al-Awda - Vancouver
Boycott Israeli Apartheid Campaign
Canada Palestine Association - Vancouver
Voice of Palestine - Vancouver
The Canadian Arab Federation - National
Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights - University of British Columbia
StopWar Coalition.
Canadians Against War
Adala - Arab Justice Committee

For more information or to add your endorsement: vancouver.gazaprote st@gmail. com.

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Please come out rain, snow or shine to demonstrate your outrage and our collective humanity in response to the latest massacre of Palestinians.

At least 200 Palestinians have been killed and over 800 injured in the latest Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip, while the threat for further bloodshed still hands heavily as air strikes continue. This is the single largest massacre in Gaza since Israel illegally occupied Gaza in 1967, many among the dead are civilians and the numbers keeps mounting.

Israel’s latest massacre in Gaza occurs with official US and Canadian complicity towards Israel’s illegal siege and ongoing sanctions over the civilian population in Gaza. Over the past two years the Gaza Strip has been undergoing the daily violence of a wide-ranging humanitarian catastrophe triggered by severely reduced access to energy, food, and medicines. In effect, Gaza is the world’s largest open air prison.

Demonstrations are planned all over the world in the next few days including in the Canadian cities of Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa. Join us in Vancouver as people of conscience to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people of Gaza and to demand an end to the siege of Gaza and Israeli apartheid.

The statement from our government is of the same moral cowardice that turned away Jewish refugees fleeing an evil, racist regime almost 70 years ago. Two generations have passed and still our governments stand with evil and racism.

I guess that's why 44 percent of Palestinians voted for "Change and reform" (aka the Hamas list). Who brought that up? Oh yeah, it was me. You might infer from such a statement that I was aware that 56 percent voted for others. What did the collective "Alternative" of the leftist parties and the PFLP get in the last election... 6%... or something?

I have no idea why I am being favoured with this lecture about the diversity of views in the Arab world, but be that as it may, if you think that getting 5% of the popular vote qualifies an organization as being a legitimate voice of leadership and opinion on Palestinian issues, you might agree that getting 7 times that amount does not disqualify Hamas from similar respect even if people here don't like their world view.

I feel that the goal of understanding a complex situation, such as the one faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, is best served not by turning off what we don't like in favour of listening to voices that we approve.

Speaking of diversity, and avoiding blanket distortions, lets also not forget, that "Change and Reform" was not just a Hamas list, but also a list comprised of many independents, and one that also ran women and Christians on their slate.

Not recognizing the legitimacy of Hamas as a leadership movement among the Palestinians people, as Unionist is doing, is by extentsion deligitimizing its right to govern as the duly elected and responsible government of the PA, as chosen by the Palestinian people, and is therefore not defending "the Gazan people" or the right of the Palestinian people to determine their own destiny, but rather, playing into propaganda tropes (such as the one about "terrorist infrastructure" -- really Palestinian police facilities -- that we see in the quote from the IDF in the OP) that aid the forces of occupation. 

 To me, your view comes off as more simplistic western anti-Islamic prejudiced half-baked in western war on terror stereotyping, and not in accord with the facts.

Hamas' campaign among women helped victory

I think you're "essentializing" Hamas in terms of a cheap western stereotype about Muslims, the majority religion of the Arab people. 

When speaking of feminism, the voice of Palestinian women should count for something don't you think? Or can we just dismiss that because the vehicle they chose to express their disatisfaction with the status quo is unappealing from the standpoint of our own idealized, but hardly realized western conceptions?

Here's an idea... they know something we don't. Possible, or no?

Winnipeg:

Israel is obviously encouraged by the stands (or silence) of the world community.

Canada, of course, was among the first to react by condemning Hamas rockets and not even mentioning the savage Israeli air strikes.

Obama, another staunch ally and inciter of Israeli savagery, spoke to Condie Rice for eight minutes about Gaza and South Asia, and then sent his spokesperson to say that "there is one president at a time". Thank you, Obama.

We have to go back to July 8, 2008 to understand why Israel feels they are on solid ground in carrying out these war crimes (from the same AFP story):

Israel destabilizes the Middle East, attacks and divides the Arab people, disrupts the formation of a secular pan-Arab nationalism of the kind that Nasser and others represented in embryo, provides a convenient external enemy to divert attention from domestic problems in the region, keeps the despotic pro-U.S. tyrants in power (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Gulf states, etc. etc.) - and ensures an uninterrupted flow of oil to the White Christian Fathers. Occasionally, where the system breaks down (e.g. Iraq), direct intervention by the Fathers is required, but often enough (Lebanon, Iran, also Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and the disinherited Palestinians), Israeli military might or merely the threat of its use suffices to keep the natives in check.

No, it's not love of Jews, or evangelical Christianity, or the "Jewish lobby", or any of the other pretexts for covering up pure imperial aims - no more than it was when the Ottomans and then the British and French ran roughshod over the region. It is selfish imperial greed, and no number of cadavers is too many to slake the thirst of the beast.

I guess. Of course, its merely the outlook of a large number of Palestinians, including Palestinian intellectuals such as the late Edward Said. When Palestinian say that Fatah is "corrupt", they do not mean that its ministers are taking bribes on the side (though there is that too), they mean it serves the ends of the occupation, and operates as the "indigenous" enforcers of the occupation.

The fact that such opposition would formulate itself around traditional organizational forms, founded in the local cultural traditions and organization, in this case Islamic ones that are clearly independent of the ideological trappings that tie it to the corrupted resistance is also predictable. But you can be forgiven your whimsical nostalgia for Nasserite, Pan-Arabism, because its clear you haven't actually read a lot of Palestinian commentary. Meaning, you would prefer not to listen so that you can impose the world view that you are comfortable with.  

Now, of course, nothing is black and white, and numerous principled secularist people, such as Marawan Barghouti, continue to carry on the struggle in Fatah, and elsewhere outside of the dynamics of the Fatah/Hamas split, but dismissing the legitimacy of Hamas as a representative of the Palestinian people, because it is founded in Islamic traditions, is a cop out.

Perhaps it will be that the left will one day be able to resurrect itself as a force in Palestinian politics, but denying the reality, in favour of comfortable fantasies, such as the idea that Hamas can be dismissed merely a creature of Israeli malfeasance, is not going to bring that goal any closer. Moreover, haughtily proclaiming your heartfelt desire that the Palestinians will one day find leadership, because it is "non-existent", is to exhibit extremely paternalistic attitudes.

You simply can not see anything outside of the European paradigms that you are comfortable with.

So, I said, indiginous, as opposed to Muslim, for a reason. As I have outlined most of the politics of the world over the last century were defined in the context of the ideas imposed on the rest of the world through the agency of European imperialism, and likewise the opposition to it found expression in the left/right split, and as often as not that left opposition took on imperialist forms.

One only has to look at the Soviet incorporation of the Muslim SSR's, over the heads of the "indigenous" opposition (often organized as Islamic parties) during the Russian civil war, its invasion of Iran in 1940, and the invasion of Afghanistan, to see this clearly.Is it any wonder that Arab resistance movements seek to formulate an alternate hegemony based in an ideological tradition entirely free of the taint of European ideas that not only failed to liberate, but also often exacerbated the problems faced by their people? 

You just can't stand the idea that Palestinians might be able to construct political ideas and organizations free of western tutelage. What was it you said? Oh yes: "You'd see the need to have friends. Which also means allowing people their ideas, while paying attention to their actual stands in life."