A member of the Lee Kuan Yew fanclub milieu is a dickhead? I'm surprised.
474 karma · joined April 5, 2024
'All That Is Solid Bursts into Flame: Capitalism and Fire in the Nineteenth-Century United States'
https://link.springer.com/journal/146/volumes-and-issues/37-...
Yes, and?
> Did it try to assassinate it's ambassador to the UK?
See below quotes. It also did try to assassinate US diplomat John Gunther Dean.
> Do you have other references to the theory that the reason Israel went to war with Lebanon was FLLF's operations that it blamed on Palestinians? Why would it go to war over people killing each other in Lebanon, it doesn't pass the smell test.
Not the sole reason in itself, rather a critical part of whipping political support.
[1]
> From his first day at the Defense Ministry, Sharon started planning the invasion of Lebanon. He developed what came to be known as the "big plan" for using Israel's military power to establish political hegemony in the Middle East. The first aim of Sharon's plan was to destroy the PLO's military infrastructure in Lebanon and to undermine it as a political organization. The second aim was to establish a new political order in Lebanon by helping Israel's Maronite friends, headed by Bashir Gemayel, to form a government that would proceed to sign a peace treaty with Israel. For this to be possible, it was necessary, third, to expel the Syrian forces fro Lebanon or at least seriously weaken their presence there. The destruction of the PLO would break the backbone of of Palestinian nationalism and facilitate the absorption of the West Bank into Greater Israel. The resulting influx of Palestinians from Lebanon into Jordan would eventually sweep away the Hashemite monarchy and transform the East Bank into a Palestinian state. Sharon reasoned that Jordan's conversion into a Palestinian state would end international pressures on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank.
> Sharon and Eytan, realizing there was no chance of persuading the cabinet to approve a large-scale operation in Lebanon, adopted a different tactic. They started presenting to the cabinet limited proposals for bombing PLO targets in Lebanon, expecting that the guerillas would retaliate by firing Katyusha rockets on Israel's northern settlements and that this would force the cabinet to approve more drastic measures. The idea was to implement Operation Big Pines in stages by manipulating enemy provocation and Israel's response. A number of confrontations took place in the cabinet as a result of these tactics. Ministers opposed to a war in Lebanon because they recognized where these proposals were intended to lead.
> Sharon himself displayed the same deviousness in his relations with the Reagan administration as he did in his relations with his cabinet colleagues. He fed the Americans selective information intended to prove that the PLO was making a mockery of the cease-fire agreement and to establish Israel's right to retaliate.
This coincides exactly with the FLLF terror campaign.
> On 3 June the casus belli that the hard-liners had been waiting for materialized. A group of Palestinian gunmen shot and greviously wounded Shlomo Argov, Israel's ambassador to London, outside the Dorchester Hotel.
> Mossad sources had intelligence to suggest that the attempt of Argov's life was intended to provoke an Israeli assault on Arafat's stronghold in Lebanon in order to break his power.
> Avraham Shalom, the head of the General Security Service, reported that the attack was most probably the work of the faction headed by Abu Nidal and suggested that Gideon Machanaimi, the prime minister's adviser on terrorism, elaborate on the nature of that organization. Machanaimi had hardly opened his mouth when Begin cut him off by saying, "They are all PLO."
[1] Shlaim - The Iron Wall, chapter "The Lebanese Quagmire"
> [Rise and Kill First] contains several pages devoted to the FLLF operation. Based on interviews with officials involved in the operation or who were aware of its existence at the time, it confirms that the Palestinians had been right all along: the FLLF was indeed a creation of Israel, a fictitious group used by senior officials to hide their country’s hand in a deadly ‘terrorist’ campaign.
> As Rise and Kill First documents in detail, the FLLF bombings were an integral part of this Israeli strategy of provocation. Indeed, the new Defense Minister immediately decided to “activate” the FLLF operation and sent Eitan as his personal emissary to “keep an eye” on the clandestine operation. Remarkably, at the time Eitan was serving as Begin’s “counterterrorism” adviser.
> On September 17, 1981, a car bomb exploded outside of the command center shared by the PLO and its Lebanese leftist allies in the port city of Sidon, killing over 20, most of them women and children who lived in nearby apartment buildings, John Kifner reported in the New York Times.
> Two days later, another “terrorist bomb” killed four in a crowded movie theater in West Beirut, Kifner reported. The FLLF claimed responsibility, but Palestinian officials immediately insisted that the group is “fictitious,” a ploy used by Israel to hide its hand in these attacks.
> On October 1, a car exploded near PLO offices in a crowded street in Moslem west Beirut, killing 90, as Kifner and the UPI reported. Several other vehicles loaded with explosives were found and defused in Beirut and Sidon “in what was intended as a devastating blitz against Palestinians and leftist Lebanese militiamen by rightist terrorists.”
> A RAND report on ‘recent trends in international terrorism’ published in April 1983 describes a few of these bombings in some detail. The death toll from these few bombings adds up to 120. By comparison, and according to the same RAND report, in 1980 and 1981 combined Palestinian ‘terrorists’ killed a grand total of 16 people. As UPI journalist Fred Schiff wrote at the time, over just two weeks the FLLF’s ‘wave of terror bombings’ in its totality claimed 308 lives.
> The censor’s decision made it possible for Israeli leaders to insist, in June 1982, that the invasion of Lebanon was justified in the name of fighting “terrorism.” Remarkably, it made it possible for Ariel Sharon to take to the pages of the New York Times in August 1982 and insist that Israeli troops “were greeted as liberators for driving out the terrorists who had raped and pillaged and plundered” the country. They had followed the Jewish doctrine of tohar haneshek, “the moral conduct of war,” Sharon added, a policy that stood “in vivid contrast to the P.L.O.’s practice of attacking only civilian targets.”
https://mondoweiss.net/2019/10/it-is-time-to-break-the-silen...
The Hamas suicide bombings in 1994 were in response to the massacre committed by Jewish terrorist Baruch Goldstein in February. The first bombing of the "wave" happened in April.
[1]
> This was the first suicide bombing attack to be carried out by Palestinian militants against Israeli civilians in Israel, and was carried out in retaliation for the killing by a settler of 29 Muslims while they were at prayer in the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron on 25 February.
> I.e. the root cause of this was Palestinians, not Israelis.
I.e. This is grossly disingenuous.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afula_Bus_suicide_bombing
Is that right?
> The survey found that 61% of the population opposes Israel's military action in the sealed-off Palestinian territory.
> Public support in Germany for Israel's military operations has dropped significantly, the survey shows.
> In November, shortly after the October 7 attacks, 62% favoured the Israeli military actions in Gaza, compared to 33% in the most recent survey, indicating a recent shift in public opinion almost eight months into the conflict.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/survey-majority-germans-oppose-is...
Same in the US, it's all fascist discourse shaping in preparation for things getting much worse.
> The INR director saw the counterinsurgency effort's emphasis on military security as insufficient. Hilsman was much more receptive to ideas for population resettlement and control along lines advanced by Robert G. Thompson, a British consultant to the Diem government, and adopted them as his own. Kennedy asked Hilsman to prepare a paper showing how this concept could work.
[1]
> Shlomo Ben-Ami, then Israel's Minister of Foreign Relations who participated in the talks, stated that the Palestinians wanted the immediate withdrawal of the Israelis from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, and only subsequently the Palestinian authority would dismantle the Palestinian organizations. The Israeli response was "we can't accept the demand for a return to the borders of June 1967 as a pre-condition for the negotiation." In 2006, Shlomo Ben-Ami stated on Democracy Now! that "Camp David was not the missed opportunity for the Palestinians, and if I were a Palestinian I would have rejected Camp David, as well."
Multiple members of Clinton's negotiating team also dispute that interpretation:
> Robert Malley, part of the Clinton administration and present at the summit, wrote to dispel three "myths" regarding the summit's failure. First myth, Malley says, was "Camp David was an ideal test of Mr. Arafat's intentions". Malley recalls that Arafat didn't think that Israeli and Palestinian diplomats had sufficiently narrowed issues in preparation for the summit and that the Summit happened at a "low point" in the relations between Arafat and Barak.
> The second myth was "Israel's offer met most if not all of the Palestinians' legitimate aspirations". According to Malley, Arafat was told that Israel would not only retain sovereignty over some Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, but Haram al Sharif too, and Arafat was also asked to accept an unfavorable 9-to-1 ratio in land swaps.
> The third myth was that "The Palestinians made no concession of their own". Malley pointed out that the Palestinians starting position was at the 1967 borders, but they were ready to give up Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and parts of the West Bank with Israeli settlements. Further, the Palestinians were willing to implement the right of return in a way that guaranteed Israel's demographic interests. He argues that Arafat was far more compromising in his negotiations with Israel than Anwar el-Sadat or King Hussein of Jordan had been when they negotiated with Israel.
---
2001 Taba Summit
[2]
> A new round of talks was held at Taba in January 2001, during the last few days of the Clinton presidency, between President Arafat and the Israeli foreign minister, and it was later claimed that the Palestinians rejected a "generous offer" put forward by Prime Minister Barak with Israel keeping only 5 percent of the West Bank. The fact is that no such offers were ever made.
[1] Camp David wiki page
[2] Carter - Peace Not Apartheid
Operation Ranch Hand ran 1962-1972, so that's a pretty lazy snipe.
The media has realized, unfortunately, hence the latest barrage of complaints about overproduction/dumping. Blinken and Yellen's speeches about that were pathetic.
> The city paid out $639 million in police-related judgments and settlements between 2012 and the end of 2021, but only budgeted for $329 million in that span
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2022/11/03/whats-the-full-cos...
Any decent book about Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
Oddly misleading, military research definitely takes place at US universities.
Didn't seem to help the WCK crew who got a bomb dropped right through the logo on top of their car.
There is no credible evidence of this.
[1]
> There was no possibility that any Palestinian leader could accept such terms and survive, but official statements from Washington and Jerusalem were succesful in placing the entire onus for the failure on Yasir Arafat. Violence in the Holy Land continued.
In regards to the following talks at Taba, which perhaps the wiki is conflating with Camp David, Carter continues:
[2]
> A new round of talks was held at Taba in January 2001, during the last few days of the Clinton presidency, between President Arafat and the Israeli foreign minister, and it was later claimed that the Palestinians rejected a "generous offer" put forward by Prime Minister Barak with Israel keeping only 5 percent of the West Bank. The fact is that no such offers were ever made.
[1]/[2] Jimmy Carter - Peace Not Apartheid (it's on Libgen, go look for yourself like I just did)