Israel under attack from hamas, war declared.

[jackspratt]

There's a fevered insistence of some media outlets that the IDF knew the precise identities of the WCK workers involved before they chose to attack these three vehicles.

Link(s)?

In non conflict zones, there's a simple process called journey management that serves to eliminate exposure to high-risk events. One of the key elements of journey management is for road travel to only take place during daylight with no night driving. Since Gaza is a war zone, one would have thought that non-military aid and relief agencies would have similar procedures in place. They obviously didn't.....

It has been widely reported, including in my link above, that WCK had such an arrangement with the IDF.

This is pretty much confirmed by the terminology used by the IDF in its "apology".

Who benefits from the speculation that this attack was deliberate and who benefits from the speculation on the relief agencies withdrawal?

Beats me - please tell us.

[jackspratt]

The evil which Hamas has bestowed is well known and widely recognised.

Apparently not enough, based on your post(s).

Here you go again - lowering yourself with unjustified slurs.

[tamada]

There's a fevered insistence of some media outlets that the IDF knew the precise identities of the WCK workers involved before they chose to attack these three vehicles.

Link(s)?

In non conflict zones, there's a simple process called journey management that serves to eliminate exposure to high-risk events. One of the key elements of journey management is for road travel to only take place during daylight with no night driving. Since Gaza is a war zone, one would have thought that non-military aid and relief agencies would have similar procedures in place. They obviously didn't.....

It has been widely reported, including in my link above, that WCK had such an arrangement with the IDF.

This is pretty much confirmed by the terminology used by the IDF in its "apology".

Who benefits from the speculation that this attack was deliberate and who benefits from the speculation on the relief agencies withdrawal?

Beats me - please tell us.

Al Jazeera are leading the charge with their "investigation" indicating the 'personal' aspects of the incident.

Following Netanyahu's ill-advised and trite "bad stuff happens during a war" statement, the IDF has more profoundly apologized for an obvious error, mistake or failure of procedures, protocols and protections in a war zone.

[Udon Map]

The evil which Hamas has bestowed is well known and widely recognised.

Apparently not enough, based on your post(s).

Here you go again - lowering yourself with unjustified slurs.

Oh, stop it. It wasn't a slur and you're not that thin skinned. It was merely a statement of my opinion that I don't think that you fully appreciate the degree and severity of the suffering of the Palestinian people for which Hamas is responsible.

Or was that your way of trying to deflect attention from the truth of my statement?

[jackspratt]

And now you are doubling down.

Shameful.

[Udon Map]

And now you are doubling down.

Shameful.

Have it your way. My comments have solely been intended as personal slurs against you, and are completely devoid of substance. You win.

[tamada]

https://news.sky.com/story/grave-mistak ... s-13108160

[Doodoo]

LULU
hope my answers satisfied your questions

[Laan Yaa Mo]

Rex Murphy weighs in on this issue:

That the red-ignorant core of this iniquity is centred on the campuses of Yale, Princeton, and that one in Toronto with the new woke name is much more a fading grief than a surprise. Ignorance and Arrogance should be the banner of these institutions. They bend to BLM, they bow to “from the river to the sea,” and they let slide the vile lies and insinuations of the true antisemitic protesters in every one of these crowds.

Hatred of Israel is the great moral disorder of our time.

Support for Israel is the moral test of democratic leaders and all people with thinking and fair minds.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-mu ... f-our-time

[rick]

During the course of the Gaza war, hundreds of journalists, aid workers, rescue staff and paramedics have been killed by the IDF. And now mass graves are being found with hundreds of bodies, some with hands bound and evidence of execution. Not exactly what you expect from an army capable of very selective targeting. Basically more like a free fire zone. Mass starvation, denial of medical care, all considered war crimes. It is not just American university students who are sickened by this, Public opinion in most countries want an end to it. Just USA government and a few European ones still support Israel.

And do not forget, that in the months since October 7th over 400 Palestinians in the West bank have been killed and 8,000 detained - guilt by association. Settlers are attacking Palestinian houses and destroying them one by one, creeping ethnic cleansing.
The world can clearly see what is happening, Yes, Hamas is evil, but Israel has shown themselves to be no better.

[Udon Map]

During the course of the Gaza war, hundreds of journalists, aid workers, rescue staff and paramedics have been killed by the IDF. And now mass graves are being found with hundreds of bodies, some with hands bound and evidence of execution. Not exactly what you expect from an army capable of very selective targeting. Basically more like a free fire zone. Mass starvation, denial of medical care, all considered war crimes. It is not just American university students who are sickened by this, Public opinion in most countries want an end to it. Just USA government and a few European ones still support Israel.

Who's really responsible for this?





OK, you'll undoubtedly point out that that report is from an Israeli source. Fair enough, here's a perspective from The Times:

And do not forget, that in the months since October 7th over 400 Palestinians in the West bank have been killed and 8,000 detained - guilt by association. Settlers are attacking Palestinian houses and destroying them one by one, creeping ethnic cleansing.

Guilt only by association? Israelis have had to put up with incidents like this (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/ ... iryat-arba) for decades, and people have had enough.

We can talk about the tragedy of the number of Palestinians who have died, but the reason is that the Palestinian leadership (but not the average civilian Palestinian) want to eliminate Jews. Palestinians have been offered an independent, separate state numerous times, but have refused/declined each time. Even now, Israel has accepted the latest terms proposed by Egypt and Qatar (hardly Israeli sympathizers), but Hamas refused.

As a former Israeli P.M. is said to have said, “If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.”

What's your suggestion for ending this?

[tamada]

During the course of the Gaza war, hundreds of journalists, aid workers, rescue staff and paramedics have been killed by the IDF. And now mass graves are being found with hundreds of bodies, some with hands bound and evidence of execution. Not exactly what you expect from an army capable of very selective targeting. Basically more like a free fire zone. Mass starvation, denial of medical care, all considered war crimes. It is not just American university students who are sickened by this, Public opinion in most countries want an end to it. Just USA government and a few European ones still support Israel.

And do not forget, that in the months since October 7th over 400 Palestinians in the West bank have been killed and 8,000 detained - guilt by association. Settlers are attacking Palestinian houses and destroying them one by one, creeping ethnic cleansing.
The world can clearly see what is happening, Yes, Hamas is evil, but Israel has shown themselves to be no better.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-ea ... 024-04-25/

[Laan Yaa Mo]

I'm not sure if this article deserves a forum subject of its own or not, but it is a byproduct of the Hamas attack on Israel so I'll place it here. The author of the article does not think much of the protesters on universities in the West who are critical of Israel, and walking around campus in their new garb to indicate they identify with Palestine. Some of the protesters hold signs that read 'from the river to the sea', and we know what they want. The comments by the readers show that there are two sides to the story. My position is that as long as the is not broken, opinions should be permitted to be voiced. I also agree with the author's comments on the privileged protesters.

Studying’s too bourgeois for these entitled clowns, but who doesn’t love a protest, right?
Camilla Long
Saturday May 04 2024, 6.00pm BST, The Sunday Times

If you grew up in Oxford, as I did, you will know what academia can do to the mind. It can turn even quite sharp, intelligent people into wailing, blabbering, urine-stained perpetual children, insulated from life’s difficulties by huge funding, grants, stipends.

Unsurprisingly, over many years, this has changed the face of education. Rare now are the Nobel prizewinners, the geniuses, the subtle, great minds. More typically, academia attracts freeloaders, pisstakers, lightweights and middle-class frauds, all coasting through life on an arrogant wave of private (often foreign) money, endowments, rich campuses and grade inflation.

It’s a racket: just as long as you can half-fill out some grant form, you can do whatever you want.

Take this incredible PhD subject: “My dissertation is on fantasies of limitless energy in the Romantic transatlantic imagination from 1760 to 1860. My goal is to write a prehistory of metabolic rift.”

Just who funds that? I couldn’t, gun to head, even pinpoint what school it was — history, sociology, politics or English? One thing I do know, though: whoever writes that dissertation is of no use to society at all.

I’m citing, of course, the PhD proposal of Johannah individual-Slutzky, a pro-Palestinian protester and student at Columbia University in New York.

You’ve possibly heard about the protests: thousands of students are staging sit-ins across America to protest against the “genocide” in the Middle East.

Taking over a campus building last week, with 30 or 40 of the world’s other richest young people, individual-Slutzky, dressed in what looked like a brand new Palestinian scarf — where did all the old grotty, genuine ones go? I miss them — demanded the university provide “humanitarian aid” to the people inside the building.

“Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation?” she said at a press conference on the building’s steps. They may be on “an Ivy League campus, but this is basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for. Like …” She looked snitty. “Could people please have a glass of water?”

She sounded like Kim Kardashian.

I watched the exchange in astonishment: how does an intelligent, critically aware person arrive at this absurd paragraph? It’s not the side of the Israel-Gaza battle she’s chosen — although we’ll come to that later. It’s the narcissism, the performative arrogance, the fake victimhood, and the lack of self-awareness, not to mention the complete insult to the people she’s meant to be supporting, of whom she, and everyone else, appears to know little or nothing.

Can’t she see that neither she nor anyone else who goes to Columbia (annual fees $89,587) is comparable to a starving, bombed, broken or dead Palestinian child? Yet these students perpetuate the fantasy: the tents they’re living in and protesting out of aren’t just tents, but “encampments”. The war in Gaza isn’t just the war in Gaza; it’s their “Vietnam” (another insult, by the way, to the students who did go to Vietnam, and actually died).

One nepo baby protester, the pouting daughter of the congresswoman Ilhan Omar, sprayed at a rally with “Liquid Ass” — a kind of stink bomb — claimed she’d been the victim of a “chemical weapons attack”. Really? Meanwhile, students scream for food, space, “intifada”, “hammocks”; the latest demand from Columbia law students is “passing grades”. The university must cancel their exams and give them passes, they wrote, because they were “irrevocably shaken” by the “violence” when the university president asked police to turn up, arresting 100.

“Passing grades”. This is what happens when the most individualistic society on earth tries to do Marxism. Education, literally, becomes worthless — a mere commodity.

The temptation, of course, is to laugh at them — at their vanity, their myopia, their tantrums, their Gucci/Balenciaga/whatever scarves (Omar’s daughter wore another pristine Palestinian shroud). But I just feel great fear and pity: how could these clever people be so incredibly stupid? What does that mean for us?

There’s no doubt where it all comes from: a generation raised to be the most educated, enlightened, anti-racist, pro-equality ever. Well, guess where that ends up. A few years ago the same people might have been screaming, “Black lives matter” — now they’re wearing totally different outfits, listening to a muezzin, praying, eating lentils and telling black people, “You’re being an agitator on purpose.”

“Look at these white liberals,” one black student said at UCLA, “cosplaying as the oppressed, stopping the African-American from accessing school. Nothing new.”

Are these students aware they’re racist? To block Jewish students, to harass them, to demand “divestment” of Jewish funds from their seats of learning — how can they not see it for what it is? As for supporting the murderous, vile Hamas — I almost feel sorry for them. Don’t they have any better causes? At least I had tuition fees.

Where does it end? As it happens, the notoriously welcoming and mellow, pro-learning Houthis have now said any students kicked out of Columbia can come and study at Sanaa University. I wonder if individual-Slutzky will take them up on the offer. Or are they — how to put it? — not accepting women?

As for the rest of us, the total collapse of education in the West — the collapse of critical thinking, of intelligence, of values, of free speech, even — is the biggest story of our lifetime. Yet no one ever speaks about it. Why? Is it because the very people we rely on to ask these questions — to have urgent debates on profound issues — have grown lazy, entitled and flush with money and decided they can no longer be bothered to fulfil their critical function in society? Instead they’ll take the funding and simply fall asleep, occasionally distracting us with increasingly bizarre, empty, vexatious positions on Gaza, race, trans. Or fatuous PhD proposals.

S F Johnson
10 HOURS AGO

You’ve skewered these entitled charlatans nicely, Camilla. You’re not alone in wondering, and despairing, about how we got here

David Tower
7 HOURS AGO

It came about by a Marxist strategy developed in the 1960's, called the long March through the institutions, taken from Mao 's long March. Rather than a violent revolution, as in Russia, western institutions would simply be undermined, from within ,over time. Education was an early target with many of the American far left becoming professors,ie Angela Davis. One of the founders of blm was also an American professor.

Mr. Henry Bennett
7 HOURS AGO
Replying to David Tower

It started much earlier than the 1960’s. The far left has been spreading revolution for the whole of the 20th Century. Supporting “liberation movements” around the world. Infiltrating education, government etc. We have been too complacent for too long. The left realised all that time ago that they ...

See more

Barbara Schmidt
5 HOURS AGO
Replying to Mr. Henry Bennett

Revolution is not about percentages.

Stephen Thompson
4 HOURS AGO
Replying to David Tower

More like Gramsci, taking ‘over the ideological state apparatus’, schools, media, church, education. I remember that from my A level Sociology, so finally useful, 43 years later.

Dave Rashford
2 HOURS AGO
Replying to Stephen Thompson

So funny to watch the right wingers lose all touch with reality. It’s called democracy. No one wants your culture war nonsense. The more you bang on about it, the less electable the Tories will be.

Dave Rashford
2 HOURS AGO
Replying to David Tower

I often wonder if the right wing descent into conspiracy theories is a by product of increased incidence of mental decline in older people.

robert dunne
4 HOURS AGO

They are standing up to genocide.

JTyrer
9 HOURS AGO

Toomaj Salehi is Iran’s leading hip-hop artist. He’s young, “street” and radical. And he’s just been sentenced to death by Tehran for “corrupting the Earth “, ie criticising the regime there. If these narcissistic, ignorant, entitled, tunnel-visioned, prejudiced students understood anything about t...

John Neill
8 HOURS AGO

Clearly not fashionable enough for them, like sheep they must follow the crowd. Camilla nailed it.

P Breen
7 HOURS AGO

I just googled him and can’t find anything under that name. All that comes up is a Palestinian American activist called Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib.

I’ve found a story about a rapper named Toomaj Salehi - is this who you’re referring to?

Phil Robertson
10 HOURS AGO

Wonderfully ironic clip of the student activist in the US saying that the protesters needed humanitarian aid. Some of them were hungry and thirsty.

Simon Good
10 HOURS AGO

And there was a Starbucks (undamaged by shelling I presume) about 100m away. It was almost python-esque.

Paul W Jarvis
10 HOURS AGO

Expel the lot of them!!

Su Burke
8 HOURS AGO

Have a read of the Koran. In a war situation it allows lies. How unlike the home life of our own YAWEH

Malcolm Griffiths
8 HOURS AGO
Replying to Su Burke

I tend not to read novels about imaginary gods and their invented prophets, whether the bible, talmud, quran or marvelman comics.

Islam has held the Palestinians as hostages, too, for the last 76 years; preventing any rational agreements; keeping them as wandering refugees so that they can be used f...

N Cleere
10 HOURS AGO

Good article … you’ve managed to put into words the utter absurdity of these people.

riccarda monticello
2 HOURS AGO

The question Watson(s) is not 'why are they protesting/'. Rather 'why aren't more people protesting/' Class dismissed.

Michael Ward
10 HOURS AGO

Please distinguish between students of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics and those so called students of the arts and social sciences. One group is honourable the other group rather less so.

What has honour got to do with this? An all-round education, as opposed to “grades” and degrees, includes the arts, and learning a bit of history would not do all these people any harm!

P Loughlan
10 HOURS AGO

A staggeringly ugly and ignorant article.

Michael Graves
10 HOURS AGO

Nope - an article about staggeringly ugly and ignorant protesters. Mrs G.

J Morris
9 HOURS AGO

Excellent article Camilla.

rodney gardner
6 HOURS AGO

Camilla, I'm so impressed with how viciously, but appropriately, you expose these phony, self righteous, over privileged student protesters.

david main
8 HOURS AGO

I wouldn't be surprised if quite a lot of these students would not be able to point to Gaza on a map.

M Montagu Montgomery Donkin
9 HOURS AGO

The naive students are not the worst problem that the civilised world faces. There is a disturbing video on Twitter of a Green Party councillor winning a local election. For his "victory" speech he is surrounded by bouncers waving the Palestinian flag and he tells us that his win is for "Gaza, Allu...

Malcolm Fried
8 HOURS AGO

Well argued. These kids who demand a safe space, an echo chamber, constant validation, endless reward for simply existing … well, the world and its real people await, and they’re nothing like your flaccid university childminders.


Reply

Recommend (22)

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C Gilmore
7 HOURS AGO

Malcolm doesn't care about 10K dead children.

Sophie Chatziapostolou
8 HOURS AGO

Surprised the Times would publish such a tone-deaf and venomous piece of writing - ‘genocide’ in inverted commas was probably the low point for me.

David Godfrey
7 HOURS AGO

I wonder how a Hamas fighter would react if he accidentally got into a Yom Kippur service and heard everybody saying "Hamasnu" (and it's said ten times - it means "we have committed over-the-top violence". Actually, inverted commas round "genocide" are correct; despite the air strikes, nobody is tr...

Lindsay Hancox
9 HOURS AGO

Your best article/s yet - spot on with both sections. Virtue signalling (on every subject, seemingly) has become a cancer among the young and celebs. It's ok to stand up and say "this is nonsense", surely?

Old Sarum
10 HOURS AGO

Brilliant analysis Camilla, when will the scales be lifted from everyone’s eyes?

R Peacock
7 HOURS AGO

Quite one of the most pin point accurate pieces to appear in any of your columns Camilla, since I first started reading them, which was a wee while ago..

"Entitled clowns"... How succint.. Summer semester in the Hamptons..

And whatever our UK equivalent is..

Left Wing bourgeois...hypocrites.

"Champers ...

Sid Smith
7 HOURS AGO

Israel has killed 10,000 children.

How should we respond, Camilla?

John Cook
7 HOURS AGO

Please explain the effect that what is happening at Columbia and other Unis is having on the war. You are missing the point by a long way.

S Blair
7 HOURS AGO

That’s not what she said at all in this article. She was merely calling out the absurdity of these professional protesters who this week are pretend rag heads and next week will have moved onto the next circus. All for the gaining of individual attention and faux outrage.
/quote]

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/stud ... -rtw3pjftj

[tamada]

^ Thanks LYM. If I see another keffiyeh-wearing London protester on Sky News banging on about dead babies and "genocide", I'll start watching RT (again).

https://kufiya.org/

[Laan Yaa Mo]

^ Thanks LYM. If I see another keffiyeh-wearing London protester on Sky News banging on about dead babies and "genocide", I'll start watching RT (again).

https://kufiya.org/

I think the Guardian and The Times (London) have some of the best writers of news in the world. I prefer the Chinese news station to RT.

[tamada]

^ Thanks LYM. If I see another keffiyeh-wearing London protester on Sky News banging on about dead babies and "genocide", I'll start watching RT (again).

https://kufiya.org/

I think the Guardian and The Times (London) have some of the best writers of news in the world. I prefer the Chinese news station to RT.

They better be good because not only are they among the international press that's prohibited from reporting from inside Gaza and the West Bank, the Israeli cabinet have voted to shut down Al Jazeera's operations inside Israel, citing a "threat to national security."

"The extraordinary order, which includes confiscating broadcast equipment, preventing the broadcast of the channel’s reports and blocking its websites, is believed to be the first time Israel has ever shuttered a foreign news outlet operating in the country".

Now that is something worth taking to the streets to protest against.

https://apnews.com/article/israel-aljaz ... e60d1de5e4

[Sport]

Australia voted yes at the toothless tiger UN assembly on Friday to allow Palestine under the control of the terrorist murderers Hamas to be a minor player on the floor of the UN. The USA, UK and Canada abstained or voted against the vote, well done. Australia now joins the Muslim countries who want to destroy Israel, sad to be an Aussie. labor in OZ is a bunch of slimy gutless spineless pollies.

[jackspratt]

Well done by Australia in joining with other democratic countries such as;

- Belgium
- Brazil
- Denmark
- France
- Greece
- India
- Indonesia
- Ireland
- Japan
- New Zealand
- Norway
- Poland
- Portugal
- South Korea
- Singapore
- Spain

in voting to pass a resolution to provide new "rights and privileges" to a Palestinian state and push the Security Council to reconsider their admission as the 194th member of the U.N.

Without such pressure on the recalcitrant Israel, the slaughter in Gaza, and the oppression in the West Bank, will continue for as long a people like Netanyahu and his convicted terrorist supporters on the far right of Israeli politics continue in power.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

And what will that do to stop Hamas and end their declared policy of from the river to the sea?

[tamada]

The US momentarily stalled on approving an arms shipment to Israel over concerns that it included 2000lb bombs. Storm in a teacup as Biden has just signed off on a $1 billion arms package. The IDF can now press on with eradicating Hamas. Being allowed to use heavier ordnance on the estimated four remaining Hamas battalions in Rafah would be a quicker solution, ultimately reducing the escalating amount of civilian casualties. Civilians who have already been heeding IDF warnings to vacate Rafah

Then they can focus on the resurgence of armed Hamas resistance in Kahm Yunis and the north.

Meanwhile, the Hamas operated Gaza heath ministry is trotting out the same "last gasp" rubbish, "We are only a few hours away from the collapse of the health system in the Gaza Strip as a result of the failure to bring in the fuel needed to operate electricity generators in hospitals, ambulances and transport employees," the Gaza Health Ministry said.

Deja vu (again)

https://s2.washingtonpost.com/3db84d4/6 ... 6ee07b1dc1