Rolling MENA 2014 (Middle East)

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/world/middleeast/israelis-watch-bombs-drop-on-gaza-from-front-row-seats.html?_r=1

"atmosphere of fear in Israel"

well Charles Krauthammer has confirmed that Israel's doing the correct and moral thing by invading, we can all sleep well tonight!

what would they have to gain from deliberately targeting children? sadistic glee? is that really what you believe?

― Mordy, Wednesday, July 16, 2014 5:03 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sadistic glee:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/dorsey/israeli-crowd-cheers-as-missile-hits-gaza-live-on-cnn

Exactly.

Meanwhile, Bill Maher manages to defend slaughter and domestic violence in 140 characters:

http://i.imgur.com/WPotumg.jpg

Operation Protective Edge

i've been thinking for like 5 minutes but i literally do not have words for that besides fuck bill maher

Has been and always will be a horrible person

christ Maher's smug mug. enough of him.

I am a big Zionist and screw Bill Maher and screw people in Sderot who treat a war like a Transformers movie and screw anybody who thinks that being a Zionist means you're psyched about innocent people getting killed.

I support dropping that shithead on Hamas. Or Israel.

An unusually cogent piece appears on the NYT Op page:

Israel immediately sought to undermine the reconciliation agreement by preventing Hamas leaders and Gaza residents from obtaining the two most essential benefits of the deal: the payment of salaries to 43,000 civil servants who worked for the Hamas government and continue to administer Gaza under the new one, and the easing of the suffocating border closures imposed by Israel and Egypt that bar most Gazans’ passage to the outside world.

Yet, in many ways, the reconciliation government could have served Israel’s interests. It offered Hamas’s political adversaries a foothold in Gaza; it was formed without a single Hamas member; it retained the same Ramallah-based prime minister, deputy prime ministers, finance minister and foreign minister; and, most important, it pledged to comply with the three conditions for Western aid long demanded by America and its European allies: nonviolence, adherence to past agreements and recognition of Israel.

Israel strongly opposed American recognition of the new government, however, and sought to isolate it internationally, seeing any small step toward Palestinian unity as a threat....

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/opinion/gaza-and-israel-the-road-to-war-paved-by-the-west.html

here's the first issue of a magazine ISIS have put out - https://ia902500.us.archive.org/24/items/dbq01_desktop_en/dbq01_desktop_en.pdf

http://ottomansandzionists.com/2014/07/18/the-turkish-governments-journey-down-the-rabbit-hole/

the one comment so far worth reading too

bill maher was at a video game party years and years ago and my friend who worked at c@pc0m drug him out by his collar because he was drunk and grabbing all these womens's asses and being gross

this is really tremendous: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/18/father-children-gaza-bloodshed-palestinians-israelis

Turks tossing around genocide accusations is p rich. they should know amirite

xp

if only hamas had a state sponsor like putin who could casually mention that hamas would be willing to completely demilitarize under agreeable supervisory bodies in exchange for open borders + lifting naval embargo - i feel like that could actually produce change between Israel + Gaza (thinking of syria as a template). it's hard to imagine bibi agreeing to this, but it's even harder for me to imagine hamas agreeing :/

yeah good guardian piece
xp

look i know this kind of terminology gets thrown around in extremely loose and inflammatory ways but idk how to interpret this in any other way than to say it's fascist:

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/15326#.U8q0_WK9KSO

a political rival of netanyahu's and not a minister w/ portfolio (if i read wiki correctly) but still:

Sovereignty – Gaza is part of our Land and we will remain there forever. Liberation of parts of our land forever is the only thing that justifies endangering our soldiers in battle to capture land. Subsequent to the elimination of terror from Gaza, it will become part of sovereign Israel and will be populated by Jews. This will also serve to ease the housing crisis in Israel.

a "solution" to make "living room", i mean, come on now...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/world/middleeast/attack-kills-at-least-20-egyptian-soldiers-at-checkpoint-in-western-desert.html

http://www.theonion.com/articles/palestinians-starting-to-have-mixed-feelings-about,36497

Netanyahu keeps it classy by saying that Hamas is using "telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause".

"we killed way more children than that but they only show the cute ones"

rumsfeltian prose

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-jewish-families-20140720,0,4513989.story

Kerry's "It's a hell of a pinpoint operation" at least indicates he might have the same kernel of self-hatred that Obama must have.

yeah i likewise found that satisfying

otoh, he's repulsive

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/kerry-snaps-at-cnns-crowley-hamas-tries-to-provoke-questions-like-yours/

these tunnels are nuts:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/21/how-hamas-uses-its-tunnels-to-kill-and-capture-israeli-soldiers/

http://972mag.com/how-can-you-possibly-oppose-this-war/93924/

I lol'd
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BtEe-a6CUAAt6Sd.jpg

I mean, it makes fucking sense.

really good read: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118751/how-israel-palestine-peace-deal-died

(very inside-baseball narrative)

FAA bans all flights into Ben Gurion

https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/1362/5848/6m/s.telegraph.co.uk/graphics/html/Years/2014/July/img/gazaDeaths2.png

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/palestinianauthority/10984259/Revealed-the-Palestinian-children-killed-by-Israeli-forces.html

http://www.timesofisrael.com/for-second-time-rockets-found-at-un-school-in-gaza/

"How many more schools will have to be abused by Hamas missile squads before the international community will intervene."

The brass balls on this motherfucker.

Yeah, how dare he object to missiles being stored in schools, fuck that guy. I do appreciate the UNRWA policy of turning the missiles over to the authorities, though. Very sensible.

BTW, the more this mess continues, the more outright anti-Semitism (that is, no doubt as to intent) I keep encountering, which makes me even more uncomfortable than re-reading the Hamas charter made me feel. I fully support a Palestinian state, but fuck all supporters of Hamas and whatever it is they claim to want.

Of course I'm not cool with rockets hidden in schools. I need to walk you through the irony of Israel calling on the international community to act?

There's double irony, because it was in a UN school, and then the UN turned the missiles over the the Palestinians! So it's Israel asking the international community to intervene in the international community intervening.

Has anyone ever seriously broached the idea of the UN, er, occupying the region as a peacekeeping force?

kurdish oil odyssey http://graphics.wsj.com/kurdish-crude-journey/

http://blogs.rollcall.com/the-container/ted-cruz-sees-obama-economic-boycott-of-israel/

ted-cruz-sees

"Ted Cruz Sees" is the new "Alan Keyes Is Making Sense"

been thinking about ISIS

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bsx6Zd6CEAEO-NW.jpg

despite all their talk about sykes-picot & restoring the caliphate there's something very modern about them. there are quite a lot of imams who like to wag their fingers at ~internet islam~, and ISIS are masters of its militant & extremist form. they fit v well into the media narrative about sectarianism and they've managed to claim ownership over the loss of govt control in mosul, harnessing anti-maliki sentiment while being a figurehead for something else. when they did a similar thing in fallujah & ramadi at the start of the year they weren't properly differentiated from al-qaeda in the western consciousness & didn't get the same sort of coverage, but now the impression you get from the media is that they're somehow running the north of iraq with ~6000 people.

I think their inflated image is not so much due to scaremongering about them as the irrational muslim Other, but because they've got lots of members who've grown up online (& mb as many as 5% from western europe) & operate in a way which is very familiar.

http://www.addictinginfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/image1-500x321.jpg

they churn out so many strong images (in most weeks they'd have all the coverage), some obviously ending up reapproapriated, even making it as far as the church of england's twitter profile pic - http://www.ndf.fr/files/avatars/483/9717fe0f33210f2e1f9af4d7d6013817-bpthumb.jpg the magazine I linked to upthread is p amazing as an artefact, they're ruling social media & they advertise themselves to donors just like a modern corporation would. they're recognisable as an uncanny shadow that adopts the tactics of their professed enemies. i'd like to know what actual solutions to sunni grievances are being dreamed up by maliki & allies/the US right now though

I'm sure someone could make an argument that all salafi islam in the sayyid qutb vein is modern in a sort of counter-enlightenment sense but idk much about it

as edward said would doubtless have it, and without wishing to determine which of those is newton and which is leibniz, its probably safe to assume that she could come up with that pose independently and without any exposure to the western internet

i'm arguing medium>message, why would she be posing if not for v similar media? etc.