Jimmy Carter Praises Arafat

[Aaron]

Bullshit detected. The bombing of Rotterdam was ordered when German paratroopers where locked in combat against Dutch troops. A defended city is subject to bombardment, and the raid was directed against those very Dutch troops. What happened was that while the raid was still in the air the Dutch began negotiating surrender; they however dragged the process out for hours. As a result when the abort order was given to the bombers, they had proceeded so far that many didn't get it, though about half the raid did turn back or bomb secondary targets outside of the city. The rest bombed the target area as ordered, which was mainly docks and warehouses where the fighting had been going on. The warehouses however where full of flammable materials, and as a resulting fires easily spread and burned a large chunk of the city. However fewer then 600 civilians died, and the city with its horribly antiquated fire brigade was spared total destruction mainly as a result of German action, with fire trucks being brought in from as far away as the Ruhr to fight the blaze.

Allied Propaganda of course twisted the raid into an intentional act of terror which killed 10,000 people.

Thank you for correcting me. So the earliest bombing of civilans in the war would be the Germans bombing London then?

[Aaron]

What the fuck does that have to do with the price of tea in China?

By the way, PPOR means "Post Proof or Retract" -a fancy way of saying "put up or shut up" or "prove it".

The proof you seek is here, it's also in every WWII referance book I've ever seen.

[Grendel]

In world war II all cities were legitimate targets for bombing, [snip]

No, deliberate attacks against civilians are war crimes.

Only if you end up losing. If you win, then it was "doing what had to be done". Duh!


Seriously, though, civilians are the mechanism an army functions upon. They make the supplies, they grow the food and so on. Targeting civilian installations shouldn't be a war crime if that civilian installation is largely part of the overall war effort.

As this pertains to the Israel/Palestine conflict is as such: corner cafes are not part of the Israeli "war effort" (if you can even call it as such) against the Palestinians. Busses taking people to and from work are not part of the Israeli military industrial complex. Targeting markets and shops is barbaric and unforgiveable. Perhaps it's my bias showing through, but whenever I hear about Palestinians attacking Israelis, the target always seems to be a bus or a market or a resteraunt. Whenever I hear about Israelis attacking Palestinians, It's ususally in the context of attacking terrorists.

I'll take the Israelis' tactics over the Palestinians' tactics any day of the week.

[Elfdart]

In world war II all cities were legitimate targets for bombing, [snip]

No, deliberate attacks against civilians are war crimes.

Only if you end up losing. If you win, then it was "doing what had to be done". Duh!

Whatever you say, Axis Kast Junior.

Seriously, though, civilians are the mechanism an army functions upon. They make the supplies, they grow the food and so on. Targeting civilian installations shouldn't be a war crime if that civilian installation is largely part of the overall war effort.

Why not kill their children, too? If not, they'll grow up to produce things used in a war effort. Another disciple of Chivington, I see.

As this pertains to the Israel/Palestine conflict is as such: corner cafes are not part of the Israeli "war effort" (if you can even call it as such) against the Palestinians. Busses taking people to and from work are not part of the Israeli military industrial complex. Targeting markets and shops is barbaric and unforgiveable. Perhaps it's my bias showing through, but whenever I hear about Palestinians attacking Israelis, the target always seems to be a bus or a market or a resteraunt. Whenever I hear about Israelis attacking Palestinians, It's ususally in the context of attacking terrorists.

I'll take the Israelis' tactics over the Palestinians' tactics any day of the week.

Palestinians also attack military targets. Don't forget, soldiers and police occupying foreign soil are fair game. During the assault on Jenin, the IDF (according to Human Rights Watch) machinegunned an old man in a wheelchair and committed other atrocities. An elderly man was crushed to death by IDF bulldozers when Israeli soldiers demolished his home. They wouldn't even allow his family to remove him from the building. There are many others. You don't hear about it much in the US because of the pro-Israel bias in most of the media. Arafat was almost always called a "terrorist", while Sharon (a man with a MUCH larger amount of innocent blood on his hands) is not.

[Sea Skimmer]

Thank you for correcting me. So the earliest bombing of civilans in the war would be the Germans bombing London then?

Well that's a vague question; Warsaw was the first major city to the bombed in the war. But the city was under siege at the time and the raid was mainly aimed at valid targets, such as the cities gasworks. But then the early London raids where all targeted on the cities massive dockyards too. But London is certainly the first sustained effort in which bombing was directed specifically against the civilian population.

[The Cleric]

No, deliberate attacks against civilians are war crimes.

Only if you end up losing. If you win, then it was "doing what had to be done". Duh!

Whatever you say, Axis Kast Junior.

Did you not see the " " and the " "?

Seriously, though, civilians are the mechanism an army functions upon. They make the supplies, they grow the food and so on. Targeting civilian installations shouldn't be a war crime if that civilian installation is largely part of the overall war effort.

Why not kill their children, too? If not, they'll grow up to produce things used in a war effort. Another disciple of Chivington, I see.[/quote]

Slippery slopes not allowed here.

[mauldooku]

Slippery slopes not allowed here.

It isn't a slippery slope, but it is a False Dilemma. Grendel initially claimed that those civillian installations should be fair game if they are directly related with the war effort, and obviously, children have nothing to do directly with the war effort.

[Grendel]

No, deliberate attacks against civilians are war crimes.

Only if you end up losing. If you win, then it was "doing what had to be done". Duh!

Whatever you say, Axis Kast Junior.

Seriously, though, civilians are the mechanism an army functions upon. They make the supplies, they grow the food and so on. Targeting civilian installations shouldn't be a war crime if that civilian installation is largely part of the overall war effort.

Why not kill their children, too? If not, they'll grow up to produce things used in a war effort. Another disciple of Chivington, I see.

As this pertains to the Israel/Palestine conflict is as such: corner cafes are not part of the Israeli "war effort" (if you can even call it as such) against the Palestinians. Busses taking people to and from work are not part of the Israeli military industrial complex. Targeting markets and shops is barbaric and unforgiveable. Perhaps it's my bias showing through, but whenever I hear about Palestinians attacking Israelis, the target always seems to be a bus or a market or a resteraunt. Whenever I hear about Israelis attacking Palestinians, It's ususally in the context of attacking terrorists.

I'll take the Israelis' tactics over the Palestinians' tactics any day of the week.

Palestinians also attack military targets. Don't forget, soldiers and police occupying foreign soil are fair game. During the assault on Jenin, the IDF (according to Human Rights Watch) machinegunned an old man in a wheelchair and committed other atrocities. An elderly man was crushed to death by IDF bulldozers when Israeli soldiers demolished his home. They wouldn't even allow his family to remove him from the building. There are many others. You don't hear about it much in the US because of the pro-Israel bias in most of the media. Arafat was almost always called a "terrorist", while Sharon (a man with a MUCH larger amount of innocent blood on his hands) is not.

Forgive me. My post seemed to indicate that I think the Israelis' tactics are wholly unquestionable, and I don't believe that is the case. Of course they are responsible for some criminal conduct and I think anyone who doesn't see that is a little too blinded by ideology to see the forest for the trees, so to speak. I do, however, think the Palestinians are worse.

Now, not every news source here in the US is biased on the side of the Israelis. News sources like CNN and NPR are extremely sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. What's more is that I don't get my sources soley from American journalists because I don't think they offer me the entire picture and I am not arrogant enough to think that American news is the end-all be-all of unbiased journalism.

Now, if Palestinians relentlessly targeted only police stations or military posts, then I would be far more sympathetic to their cause. Instead, they blow themselves up on buses and in gathering places throughout the civilian population. Because of that, I hope that the Israelies clearly come out on top of the struggle.

[tharkûn]

No, deliberate attacks against civilians are war crimes.

As opposed to starving them out? As opposed to continuing the conventional bombing? As opposed to the orgy of civillian death that was Ketsu Go? When the secratary of the navy estimated the death toll for the Japanese for Olympic and Coronet, it arrived at the figure 5-10 million.

If Truman had opted for Olympic instead of the nuclear option, more Japanese civillians would have died. At the very least every planner (from Nimitz to MacArthur to Marshall to the joint chiefs) was preaching some hideous death toll for all concerned.

If the Japanese wanted to protect their citizens they could have declared the cities to be undefended and removed military assets, alternatively they could have evacuated the civillians. They elected their course of action, hell they kept fighting after the first nuclear bomb.

But hey let's kill ten times as many civillians, at least that way it will pass Elfy's morality test

[Predator]

Here's something on WW2 civilian bombing:

At the outset of World War II, the RAF and the Luftwaffe were reluctant to bomb one another. To a suggestion that the RAF bomb Ruhr industry, the Air Minister responded indignantly that "factories were private property." On 4 September 1939, Britain attacked the German fleet at Wilhelmshafen, warning crews that no bombs should fall on shore and no merchant ships should be hit. Goering wanted to launch a strike against the British home fleet, but Hitler refused permission and Goering had to settle for an October raid on the Firth of Forth. His bombers spotted H.M.S. Hood riding at anchor, a sitting duck, but the pilots passed it up; it was moored too close to the shore. In 1939 neither the British nor the Germans wanted an air war; by 1940, both did.

On 14 May 1940 the Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam because a communications breakdown prevented bomber crews from learning that the raid had been canceled. The attack killed 1,000 Dutch civilians, although 30,000 fatalities were reported to the world. Britain struck back the next day, sending 100 bombers to the Ruhr.

Two months later the Battle of Britain began, pitting RAF Fighter Command against Luftwaffe bombers attempting to destroy fighter fields and factories. During the summer of 1940 the RAF bombed Hamburg, Bremen, Essen, and a score of other cities. The Luftwaffe steered clear of London until one night in August when a dozen German aircraft, searching for oil tanks at Thameshaven and Rochester, and misled by a navigation error, bombed central London. Bomber Command pounced on the mistake, hammering Berlin for a week; Churchill hoped the Luftwaffe would retaliate by bombing English cities which, as R.H. Fredette notes in The Sky on Fire, would be "less dangerous" for Britain than allowing the Luftwaffe to maintain its attacks on Fighter Command. Goering obliged; more than 300 bombers struck London on 7 September, confirming Churchill's fat-cow prediction. Fredette maintains that the British "precipitated" the Blitz, provoking Germany into civilian bombing, a policy that the Luftwaffe was unprepared for, and poorly equipped to execute. Germany, Peter Fleming claims in Operation Sea Lion, did not plan the Blitz in advance.

Bomber Command analysts got to work, and identified a new and virtually unlimited supply of bombing targets--enemy civilians. Instead of having to pay, feed, clothe, train, and equip British soldiers, only to have them slaughtered en masse, they could slaughter enemy civilians en masse. A few thousand incendiaries would not only raze a factory, but waste the workers, their families, and their housing. Bombers had a new strategic mission: night attacks on factories and workers' houses; according to Fredette, this area-bombing strategy really meant "city-killing." Churchill's controversial adviser, Frederick Lindemann, reported on 30 March 1942 that if the 58 German cities with populations over 100,000 were subjected to area bombing, one-third of the German population "would be turned out of house and home." Lindemann, soon to become Lord Cherwell, couched his proposal in an adroit euphemism--"dehousing" the enemy, hardly more serious than "delousing" him.

A new and unforeseen weapon came into play at Hamburg--the firestorm. Martin Middlebrook describes one in The Battle of Hamburg. A thermal column of wind generated heat in excess of 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, melting trolley windows and the asphalt in streets, the wind uprooting trees. When people crossed a street, their feet stuck in the melted asphalt; they tried to extricate themselves with their hands, only to find them stuck as well. They remained on all fours screaming. Small children lay like "fried eels" on the pavement. The firestorm sucked all the oxygen out of the city; a 15 year-old girl said that the brains of people in shelters "tumbled from their burst temples and their insides [extruded] from the soft parts under the ribs." Rhodes claims that Bomber Command killed at least 45,000 men, women, and children at Hamburg. By contrast, the bombing of Coventry killed 554 civilians and the heaviest raid on London 1,436. Civilian deaths in London during the nine months of the Blitz amounted to 20,083.

[Illuminatus Primus]

Why doesn't this little shit get liquidated for totally demolishing threads with totally off-topic flamebait red herrings?

[Rogue 9]

Why doesn't this little shit get liquidated for totally demolishing threads with totally off-topic flamebait red herrings?

Because its more fun to have him smash all records and become a three-time VI.