Last page added a couple more…

So, thus far we’ve established:

Arming and supporting an apartheid colonizing power is A-OK, as long as they serve the interests of those that fund them

War Crimes are bad when the other side does them

Israel is not party to:

The Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)
Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR)
Biological & Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC)
Intl Criminal Court (ICC)
Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM)
Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC)

Israeli Arms companies profit from using Gaza and the West bank to test weapons systems

Palestinians are only allowed primitive weapons; when those weapons fail to hit military targets (and in the vast majority are intercepted by Israel’s superior weapons systems), they can immediately be accused of attacking Israel’s civilian population

Israel’s civilian population are allowed to attack Palestinians, Palestinians are not allowed to fight back

Ukraine has every right to defend itself from invasion

Anything else?

Blimey, there’s a lot been happening here in my absence!

Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it; in time it would force the authorities to act, or risk widespread civil disobedience.

I’d have big billboards in prominent spots on either side of the wall(s), broadcasting the awkward answers of those in the chain of command of the relevant authorities gave when questioned as to why they hadn’t arrested the extremists who were inflaming the conflict.

Hopefully this would have the desired effect and the civilian populations of either side would press for justice in the quest for peace.

Just to clarify, these are the walls I’m refering to:

What will you do when your proposed peace settlement gets derailed by violent extremists, just like every previous attempt has been derailed?

Both sides have the means to capture and incarcerate extremists; at the end of the day, you have to show that such behaviour will not be tolerated; unfortunately, as it stands, that is not the case… see above:

“The Israeli Government and its military have done far too little to curb this violence and to protect the Palestinians under siege. In several cases, Israeli security forces and outsourced private security companies stand by and take no action to prevent the violence; instead, they respond to settler-related violence by ordering Palestinians to leave the area, including Palestinian-owned land, or even actively support the settlers.”

So what are your proposals for curbing colonialist settler violence, which is clearly one of the primary drivers for tensions?

Evidently you have all the answers, so fire away…

If you can’t back your treaty up with soldiers and tanks and missiles, it will collapse. So, where do you plan on getting that army?

And for bonus points:

Bomb them? Invade?

Do I honestly think for a moment that the good folk of this forum are finally going to make that all important breakthrough that ensures peace in the land the majority of us have been taught since a young age is key to all that is holy?

Probably not… clearly there are many obstacles to overcome before than can be achieved;

That said, sanctions against Israel would surely be a start, which begs the question;

Why is Israel allowed to act with such impunity?

The US’s closest ally Israel is not a party to:

The Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)
Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR)
Biological & Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC)
Intl Criminal Court (ICC)
Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM)
Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC)

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) January 9, 2020

Documenting and broadcasting attrocities has a long history of bringing those attrocities to a close…

Want warring parties to lay down their weapons? Halt the ammunition supply!

Blimey, sounds like you wanna sell more weapons!

Perhaps an army of cameras would be more effective:

First and foremost, a means of halting expansion of Israel’s territories would give a clear message to both sides that peace and stability was genuinely on the table.

This would mean full prosecution of settlers who had been found to indulge in violent behaviour, sabotage or coercion in pursuit of land grabs.

Given the history of Israel’s continued expansion, it would understandably take some time for the Palestinians to believe that the Israeli authorities were genuinely acting in the interests of the Palestinian people.

Similarly, collective punishment would have to end; this would mean ensuring consistent clean water and electricity supplies to the populations of Gaza and the West Bank.

The real shift would come from allowing children to integrate; all too often, people have been conditioned into views throughout the course of their lives and as such, are too stubborn to budge, leading to cycles of violence that span generations.

One of the main barriers to this are the billions of dollars at stake for those in the arms industry, who often use Gaza as a testing ground:

The idea that the Israeli arms industry benefits from the occupation through having a captive population it can test new weaponry on is now widely accepted.

Israel tries out weapons in the West Bank and Gaza and then presents them as “battle proven” to the international market.

The high-velocity tear gas canister has been heavily tested in Bilin. In 2009, the weapon killed Bassem Abu Rahmah, an unarmed local activist, protesting the wall slicing into that village. At the end of 2011, another protester, Mustafa Tamimi, was killed in Nabi Saleh by a tear gas canister, shot at his head.

There is a sense of weariness in Haddad’s voice. “I have seen how they are developing their tools and their weapons industry and the ways of dealing with the community,” he said. “And, in 30 years, I never heard once that there is any kind of accountability for any soldier.”

Are insults a key part of the peace process?

If we’re talking about brokering a peace deal, settler violence is an essential issue to address; I’m curious as to why thols never mentions it…

Could you explain where settler violence would fit into your narrative?

From the UN:

“Settler violence has always been an extremely disturbing feature of the Israeli occupation,” said the experts. “But in 2021, we are witnessing the highest recorded levels of violence in recent years and more severe incidents.

“The Israeli Government and its military have done far too little to curb this violence and to protect the Palestinians under siege. In several cases, Israeli security forces and outsourced private security companies stand by and take no action to prevent the violence; instead, they respond to settler-related violence by ordering Palestinians to leave the area, including Palestinian-owned land, or even actively support the settlers.”

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), already in the first 10 months of 2021, there have been 410 attacks by settlers against Palestinians (302 against property and 108 against individuals). Four Palestinians were killed by settlers this year. In 2020, there was a total of 358 recorded attacks. In 2019, there were 335 such attacks.

These settler attacks are primarily directed against rural Palestinian families living on small farms or in villages and towns in the occupied West Bank located in close proximity to Israeli settlements. Many of these Palestinians reside in the so-called “Area C” of the West Bank, which is under complete Israeli security and civil control, and where Israel’s de facto annexation stratagem is most evident.

The experts noted that settler violence has taken many forms, including physical violence, shooting with live ammunition, torching of fields and livestock, theft and vandalization of property, trees and crops, stone-throwing and tenacious intimidation of herders and their families. In the autumn, it is often directed towards Palestinians engaged in the olive harvest. Harvested olives are stolen or ruined. Olive trees are destroyed. Harvesters are attacked with rocks and pipes, or threatened with weapons.

On other occasions, settlers have seized private or public Palestinian land and brought sheep and cattle to graze on the land, as an initial step to drive Palestinians away from their land. If Palestinians attempt to keep their land, they are frequently met with violence.

“The ubiquity of these attacks, and the credible reports of the Israeli military’s passivity in combating this violence, has deepened the atmosphere of fear and coercion throughout the West Bank,” said the experts.

“We are very troubled by the failure of Israel, the occupying power, to exercise its substantial obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention, including Article 27, to protect the population under occupation.”

According to Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organization, 91 percent of investigations into settler attacks against Palestinians between 2005 and 2019 were closed by the Israeli authorities with no charges filed. Yesh Din has also reported that more than 40 percent of the Palestinians who have contacted the organization since 2018 to report settler violence have chosen not to file complaints with the Israeli authorities because they have no expectation that justice will be served.

“This precipitous rise in settler violence is not simply the result of a few ‘bad apples’ among the settler population,” the experts said. “The deep state support provided by Israel to the illegal settlement enterprise, including to the more than 140 settlement outposts established throughout the West Bank in defiance of even Israel’s own laws, has fueled this coercive environment and encouraged violence.

“In an atmosphere where the rights of the protected population are ignored, where settler violence is met with complicity and the prevailing political message from the occupying power is that this land belongs to only one people, the international community has a solemn responsibility to impose accountability measures to end this climate of impunity and to insist upon respect for the international rule of law.”

I’d be surprised if any of us were in a position to broker a groundbreaking international peace deal of a Sunday morning, but as usual, you’re conveniently forgetting something…

You need to ask yourself what kind of shots you’ll be taking; if you’re mainly run and gun, things are far simpler, but if you need to start lugging tripods around, things get a bit more intense.

Somewhere like New York, where you’ll be whipping the camera into action with all the haste of a gunslinger at noon, a shoulder strap and a small shoulder or bumbag for other lense(s) and any accessories like a cleaning cloth, filters, flash etc would be the tools for the job

For biking and hiking I use a Lowepro Fastpack 150 and it’s amazing what you can squeeze into it; obviously, there’s larger models available, but wouldn’t want to go much larger when riding a bike.

So, thus far we’ve established:

Arming and supporting an apartheid colonizing power is A-OK, as long as they serve the interests of those that fund them

War Crimes are bad when the other side does them

Natives are only allowed primitive weapons; when those weapons fail to hit military targets (and in the vast majority are intercepted by the Colony’s superior weapons systems), they can immediately be accused of attacking the Colony’s civilian population

The Colony’s civilian population are allowed to attack Natives, Natives are not allowed to fight back

Ukraine has every right to defend itself

Anything else?

Yawn…

Yet arming the invading party is wholly supported, with nary a whisper from the media

And nor was that the point of the thread, despite any pigheadedness to the contrary…

At the end of the day, we have 2 similar stories of territorial infringement and slaughter by oppressors… so why the disparity?

Say for example the media did stir up sufficient sentiment that it became politically expedient for Western Governments to sanction Israel due to it’s apartheid policies…

Couldn’t they just outsource via a 3rd party intermediary like Russia does with oil exports through that other darling of the UK and US, Saudi Arabia?

Then at least there would be some semblence of parity, rather than clear support for apartheid…

Clearly the best weapons the Palestinians could be sent is water pistols, to repel the onslaught of Israeli Bulldozers… better still, they could help distract their children from the plight of not only being regularly woken up by airstrikes and soldiers knocking doors, but terrorist acts by colonialist settlers.

Sanctions against Israel would of course never work, because they’re a nuclear power and would gladly bomb their would be customers to re-establish good business relations.

Someone give the poor lad a shake, dunno if it’s the heat or what, but he’s clearly malfunctioned and is loopier than looped tape of a hula hooping wing rider doing a loop the loop over a field of lupins on loop.

Now that we’ve established that flooding a situation with arms, be that Afghanistan in the 1980s, Syria in the 2010s, or indeed Israel in the 1940s->??? is bad, let’s talk about sanctions…

You’ve misunderstood the thread then…

That’s a very one sided argument, given not only the constant harrassment by the Israeli military, but also, by Israeli Civilians themselves…

Charges Are Pressed Only in 4% of Settler Violence Cases

When cases pertain to violence against Palestinians, investigators often ignore evidence, fail to question witnesses, or simply close case

Feb 7, 2022

Everything was documented. Videos showed a group of settlers coming into a parking area in Hawara, near the settlement of Yitzhar, and throwing stones at 13 vehicles. The footage from the security cameras was very clear. It was no secret. Later that night, soldiers arrived to document the damage. A patrol officer joined them. The police in Ariel were provided with photographs, the names of witnessess, and told that there had been soldiers on the scene at the time of the crime- and that they had footage showing exactly what happened.

The incident took place on March 15, 2020, but nearly two years later, no one has been arrested or indicted. On the contrary, the file has been closed. A file containing just a letter of complaint, photographs of the incident, and a report from the patrol officer.

This incident is one of many. At Haaretz’s request, police provided figures showing that in only 3.8 percent of criminal cases pertaining to violence against Palestinians were charges actually filed. In absolute numbers, 221 of 263 cases that were opened were closed without any action taken. Only ten of those cases resulted in an indictment. The rest are still under investigation.

Will you continue to avoid this question for another page?

So thols, since you chose not to answer the question regarding apartheid (and misrepresented the nature of this thread), is it safe to say that you yourself support apartheid?

And the silence regarding apartheid continues…

So thols, since you chose not to answer the question regarding apartheid (and misrepresented the nature of this thread), is it safe to say that you yourself support apartheid?

So thols, since you chose not to answer the question regarding apartheid (and misrepresented the nature of this thread), is it safe to say that you yourself support apartheid?

So it’s better to let apartheid continue unabated and unchallenged?

I’ve got vibrocores on a short travel 26″ 4x bike that I use for a bit of everything; I’ve ridden Cadair Idris, Snowdon, Dyfi Bike Park and all sorts of other rocky gubbins on it and never experienced arm pump.

When I started getting symptoms of HAVs from using Wacker plates when trailbuilding, I suggested injecting the wacker handles with expanding foam… somehow though, that never came to pass.

On balance, I’d say vibrocore is certainly beneficial

The Colony has a large weapons industry of its own, it is at the cutting edge of military technology. If, for some reason, the U.S. refused to supply weapons, The Colony would turn to Russia, or China, or India, or Korea, or Taiwan, or Japan, or Indonesia, or Malaysia, or Brazil, or Saudi Arabia, or the UAE, or some other country that wants access to Colony technology and will cooperate on manufacturing.

Keep in mind, The Colony has nuclear weapons that it can launch from submarines. Even if they lost the support of the U.S., no other country in the region would dare to try and invade because a successful invasion would result in The Colony unleashing their nuclear arsenal.

The idea that Natives are going to militarily defeat The Colony is a fantasy. That fantasy has to be rejected before any realistic peace settlement is possible.

Does it alter the perspective somewhat? Personally, I’m not sure, what do you think?

It brings into question how tight security on the West Bank/Israeli border is. Presumably if a huge lump of concrete can be smuggled in small weapons shouldn’t be a problem?

Interesting question… after all, we know Israel was involved in Hamas’ creation; whatsmore, there’s evidence of agent provocateurs:

But surely Israeli security forces wouldn’t stoop so low as to arm the militants who do so much for the cause of hard line settlers colonizers?

Say for example Palestine was recognized as a state and was then able to form an army with which to defend it’s civilian population from bombardment by Israel’s huge and subsidized arsenal… surely Israel would then lose the right to dictate what weapons Palestine was allowed to defend itself, which would give them the ability to use something other than crude rockets that are as much a show of defiance as any significant threat to lifestyles in the constantly expanding Israeli settlements?

Not that I favour escalation; surely de-escalation is key to peace, as opposed to lining the pockets of the ghouls who profit from war, conflict and land grabbing

Quite the opposite. If the two countries were at war, the Natives would be guilty of war crimes for attacking civilians and the Colonizers would be justified in invading. Because Native land isn’t recognized as a state, the legal basis for Colonizing behaviour is much murkier. Whatever the case, there won’t be any peace deal until Natives agree to recognize Colony as a state and stop indiscriminately attacking Colonizing civilians. Sending weapons to help them do that won’t improve things, it would just give right-wing Colonizers the best propaganda they could wish for.

Just a little experiment to see how it reads from a generic perspective…

Palestinians are probably a bit like the Native Americans in that regard…

So the fact that for whatever murky reason the international community fails to recognize Palestine as a sovereign state is the reason Israel can continue a campaign of war crimes with impunity?

Open all upstairs windows and just the ones in the shaded side of the house downstairs to set a cooling convection current in motion, bearing in mind that moving air is far more pleasant than static air.

And yet you’re claiming the milleniums and younger they brought up are more woke

That’s not at all what I’m claiming… many people have been targeting boomers as key to the predicament we find ourselves in, as if one specific generation conspired to destroy the planet for their own priviledged existence; clearly that’s not the case.

Politics is being portrayed as key to the situation, as if different results in elections where both parties are broadly similar and serve the same interests would have had such repercussions as to alter the global landscape.

How many different election results around the globe would be required to change the weather we’re experiencing today?

Of course, I’m not just talking about the UK, or Europe, or all the way yonder in Australia; I’m talking about the planet as a whole, as the issue is all encompassing; it doesn’t matter who plonks their flag on a icecap, when that icecap melts and the flag sinks to the bottom of the ocean, like much low lying land is set to in the not so distant future.

Even if Jeremy Corbyn, the wonderjesus had been elected, he wouldn’t have magically conjured a solution whereby events catalyzed decades before were turned around in 5 short years… especially with the bods in Whitehall steering government on behalf of Her Madge

just comforts views/feelings they already had and they are happy to be herded in that direction

A lot of those views/feelings are likely to have been taught by their parents… in which case, boomers are back in the frame!

It doesn’t much matter what influencers and biased media sources spout if the audience is thinking critically. It’s not what you are exposed to, its the way you recieve and percieve it.

Whilst I agree with what you’re saying, on an individual level at least, we have to take into account herd instincts; all too often, whatever dissenting voices (often the brightest critical thinkers) may say, their wisdom is lost as slowly but surely, a stampede builds and the individual is lost as yet again we’re corralled on the collective path instigated by the media at the behest of their masters, like it or no

Where do you think people in a rural town got their ideas from before TV?

Duh, the squire, obvs, or at least his appointed regurgitator of information; probably in the quaint setting of a nice country inn…

Meanwhile, those that used their own Frontal Cortices and Hippocampi excessively would likely be open to ridicule and derision

Though I’m open to other theories…

As the earliest generation to be saturated with TV and the power it has over the psyche, boomers have endured the most brainwashing…

Not just in terms of aspirational lifestyles and the allure of consumer products for social status, but also in terms of world view and political opinion

Brainwashing that continues to this day may I add, across a wider range of platforms that not too long ago would’ve been considered impossible

As always though, they still want to divide and conquer…