10,000 Britons are stranded in Lebanon

[The Lone Gunman]

George Formby's best ever track, a classic

I'm hanging from a lamp post at the corner of the street.........

[bogeyman]

I'm hanging from a lamp post at the corner of the street.........

Heh! Excellent!

Turned out nazi again!

[AlfredJPruffock]

DA

If Israel is justified in attacking Lebanon then do you think that Turkey has a case for millitary action against the Kurds, whom as you are aware have been fogring good relations with Israel.

Certainly the Turkish PM think so , and this is where the cycle of violence leads to inexorably ...

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan rapped the United States on Tuesday for tolerating Israel's attacks on its enemies in Lebanon while refusing to allow Ankara to crush Kurdish rebels hiding in northern Iraq.
Erdogan is under mounting domestic pressure to get tough with the rebels, who have killed 16 Turkish security personnel in separate attacks over the past week.

"The way they look at terror there (in Israel) and in Turkey is not the same. They show tolerance towards country A (fighting terrorism) and show a different approach to country B. This is unacceptable," Erdogan said.

He did not mention the United States or Israel by name but it was clear to whom he was referring. Erdogan, whose roots are in political Islam, has previously criticised Israel's actions.

Erdogan also repeated hints that Turkey might send troops across the border into Iraq to tackle the rebels if U.S. and Iraqi troops continued to ignore Ankara's demands to act.

"Turkey knows how to take care of itself. The relevant security institutions are working on this matter," Erdogan told a meeting of the foreign economic relations council.

[Fungus]

DaveB: You make a cogent argument that pretty much agrees with my own viewpoint.

You ask what Israel has to gain by destabalising the region in this way? I don't know, why not ask them? They seem to think it's a good move right now.

Even when the Arab extremists were on ceasefire, Israel carried on targeting their leaders. Why? Why break a ceasefire if they want peace? Why target the Palestinian Authority, which would lead to increased anarchy? And why has Israel never obeyed the terms of the last peace proposal whereby they were supposed to stop expanding settlements. Instead it has been business as usual. And why has the US not criticised them for breaking the agreements, but criticised the Palestinians?

IMO Israel does not want peace because it wants land and water. A peace deal according to the UN terms would not give them what they want as they would have to retreat to the 67 borders, and that would not be acceptable to the voters. It would be seen as humiliation, giving in to terrorism, and the road to abandoning the Jewish homeland dream.

Ideally they want all of the West Bank and Gaza, but they know that unless they exterminate Arabs, which is out of the question, they cannot integrate the territories and remain a (semi)democratic mainly Jewish state with laws that give more rights to Jews than others. So they will compromise and take the best parts of the West Bank.

I suspect they are trying to destabilise the Palestinians and others, to create anarchy, and provoke terrorist atrocities. Then they will paint the situation as the brave Jewish state facing up to the nasty terrorists, with no alternative but to annex some land, deport the Arabs, and build big walls round the Greater Israel. America will swallow it and that's all that matters.

The rest of the world might whine, but so what. Do they care? I suspect the Holocaust gives Israeli Jews a "Stuff the world, they screwed us, so now we'll look after ourselves" viewpoint of the world.

Bloody religion.

[DaveB]

Heh! Excellent!

Turned out nazi again!

[TwoWolves]

Turned out nazi again!

Best of thread..

[Fungus]

That is fair enough but Israel has been trying to engage even Hamas in the South and it has not been pursuing targets or military actions in the North. Israel has begun to dismantle settlements. It is my view that the principla agenda for Israel is peace, that where its version of peace may be at the expense of fairness with its arab nations it is for the diplomats to fine tune. History shows that whenever Israel relents its control it is immediatly attacked.

It appeared to me that Israel was peacefully working its way towards peace with its neighbours and was for no good reason attacked on two fronts.

No. Israel has dismantled tiny 'illegal' settlements i.e. ones not authorised by the Israeli state. But thet have been actively growing 'legal' ones, in contravention of the various peace deals. This is all part of Israeli spin. It is very very hard to figure out the reality behind the Westernised Israeli spokesmen. They make Northern Irish politicians sound like beginners.

And I'm not sure the massive incursions into Gaza can be described as peaceful. They were a response to kidnapping ONE soldier. FFS, we had a woman PC murdered by a Libyan in London. Did we declare war on Libya? The response is so massively disproportionate and is collective punishment in contravention of numerous treaties. The Arab terrorists are a nasty bunch, but at best Israel is behaving in a brutal and tyrannical manner towards millions of Palestinians.

What about the numerous unarmed innocent westerners, including Brits, shot dead by the IDF? Did we declare war on Israel?