Israel calls Hizbollah capture of soldiers act of war Email this Story Jul 12, 7:19 AM (ET) By Karamallah Daher MARJAYOUN, Lebanon (Reuters) - Hizbollah guerrillas captured two Israeli soldiers and killed up to seven Israelis in violence on either side of the Lebanese border on Wednesday, further inflaming Middle East tensions. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert described the Hizbollah attacks as an "act of war" by Lebanon and promised a "very painful and far-reaching" response. Two Lebanese civilians were killed and five people wounded in retaliatory Israeli air strikes after Hizbollah announced it had captured the Israelis. Israeli ground forces crossed into Lebanon to search for the captured soldiers, Israeli Army Radio said. Hizbollah and the Lebanese authorities said there was no large-scale incursion. Israeli troops have not struck deep into Lebanon since they withdrew from a southern border strip in 2000 after waging an 18-year war of attrition with Hizbollah's Shi'ite fighters. Israel is already engaged in an expanding military offensive in the Gaza Strip launched after Palestinian militants captured a soldier in a cross-border raid on June 25. "Fulfilling its pledge to liberate the (Arab) prisoners and detainees, the Islamic Resistance ... captured two Israeli soldiers at the border with occupied Palestine," the Syrian- and Iranian-backed Hizbollah said in a statement. "The two captives were transferred to a safe place," it said, without stating what condition the soldiers were in. A senior Lebanese political source said Hizbollah was willing to discuss exchanging prisoners held in Israel with the two Israeli soldiers captured on Wednesday. A Hizbollah spokesman refused to comment. "TANK DESTROYED" Hizbollah said later it had destroyed an Israeli tank that had entered Lebanon after its cross-border raid, inflicting casualties on its crew. Al Jazeera television said a total of seven Israelis had been killed in Wednesday's border violence. Defense Minister Amir Peretz said Israel held the Lebanese government responsible for the two soldiers' fate because it let Hizbollah operate freely against Israel from its territory. "Israel sees itself as being free to employ any means it deems fit, and the army has been instructed accordingly," he said in a statement, hinting at a broad military response. Hizbollah, the only Lebanese faction to retain its weapons after the 1975-90 civil war, is also a political party with 14 members in the Beirut parliament and two cabinet ministers. Israel began calling up reserve troops, signaling a large-scale campaign to retrieve the two soldiers, Israel's Channel 10 television said. In Cairo, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State David Welch condemned what he called a "dangerous escalation" and called for the release of the Israeli soldiers. The Israeli medical rescue service ZAKA said three Israelis were killed and eight wounded in the Hizbollah attacks. Hizbollah earlier fired dozens of Katyusha rockets and mortar bombs at Israeli border posts and a town. Israeli gunners hit back with artillery fire near four Lebanese border villages. Israeli planes bombed three bridges in southern Lebanon, killing two Lebanese civilians and wounding four civilians and a soldier, Lebanese security sources said. EMERGENCY CABINET MEETING Olmert called a special cabinet session for 7 p.m. (1600 GMT) to discuss further military action. "It is an act of war by the state of Lebanon against the state of Israel in its sovereign territory," he told a news conference. "We are already responding with great strength ... The cabinet will convene tonight to decide on a further military response by the Israel Defense Forces," Olmert said, threatening "very painful and far-reaching" action. Hizbollah supporters set off fire crackers and distributed sweets in the streets of Beirut after the Islamist group issued its claim. Similar scenes were reported across Lebanon. In Gaza, Israel targeted Hamas guerrilla commanders in an air strike that killed nine Palestinians and destroyed a building where the militants were believed to be meeting. The Israeli military said the air raid wounded Mohammad Deif, leader of the governing Hamas's armed wing. A spokesman for Hamas's Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades denied Deif was hurt. It coincided with an armoured sweep into the central Gaza Strip, part of an offensive aimed at freeing captured Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit and halting cross-border rocket fire. His seizure by Hamas's armed wing and allied fighters prompted Israel to launch its first ground attacks in Gaza since quitting the territory last year. More than 65 Palestinians have been killed so far in the Gaza operation. Israel has rejected calls from Hamas for a prisoner swap for the 19-year-old tank gunner, whose seizure has triggered the worst fighting between Israelis and Palestinians since 2004. (Additional reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza, Dan Williams at Kissufim and Jeffrey Heller in Jerusalem)
Apart from who's right and who's wrong in this conflict, I have to wonder if Palestinians are crazy. I mean literally crazy. I question their mental comprehension of the stakes at hand. I wonder if they have completely lost the ability to reason in any capacity whatsoever. It seems like Israel could say fuck it and use their superior fire power to wipe out 500,000 Palestinians in one fell swoop, just liquidate a huge swathe of the Gaza strip, and Hezbollah would still capture a soldier or two the very next week, and the remaining Palestinians who weren't catatonic, shell-shocked or dead would just get happy and shoot their guns in the air like they always do. No comprehension, no sense of self-preservation, no impulse to negotiate or improve their circumstances, nothing. Just Allah's will to kill Israel. Death to Israel! Death to Israel! Death to Israel! An endless chant that won't stop for anything. At all. Ever. Must be seriously frustrating. Not commenting on the morality of the conflict either way, just marveling at the awesome vacuity of the Palestinians.
What's wrong? You don't like the sound of 1.4 billion people chanting to kill, steal and destroy five times a day? http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=72657
As an IDF veteran, I learned the Muslim Arab mindset first hand and up close. I know the precise answer to your puzzle. It may take a while to grasp the concept, but I think you will: To the Paleosimians, human life is a secondary value- even their own. Money & health- secondary values as well. The land they're fighting so ferociously to claim? That too, is nothing but an unimportant secondary value. So...ready to find out the answer? The one single core value at very epicenter of the Muslim Arab male's priority list? Here you go: ___________ Muslim Arab mindset 101: Two key words: <b>HONOR & PRIDE </b>above everything else. This is how the religious zealots (Hamas, Jihad) and the secular nationalists (Fatah, PFLP) are identical. Money, possessions, comfort, blood...even human life are all secondary, relatively unimportant values compared to the Muslim Arab man's all important sense of personal and family pride. This is why when an Arab Muslim's sister/daughter has premarital sex, the 'honorable' thing to do is to publicly kill her, in order to restore the family honor. Not all suicide bombers are devout Muslims. Take away the religious brainwashing nonsense, and there is still a massive sense of pride, accomplishment, and family honor when he blows himself up killing a few hated Zionists. Becoming a Shahid (martyr) is the highest honor in his society- much more dignified than becoming a successful businessman, athlete or entertainer. Point the sole of your shoe in his direction, and he'll be whipped into such an insulted frenzy, the Western observer would think you've just shot his dog or something. Compromise is never an option to him, only absolute unquestionable victory. Anything else would be an unbearable insult to his pride. ______________ Another writer who understands the concept: http://drsanity.blogspot.com/2006/02/shame-guilt-muslim-psyche-and-danish.html Thread on this topic: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=63611&highlight=honor+pride
<img src=http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=975291> While this sounds identical to my own writing, I didn't write it: A guilt culture (i.e., the West) is typically and primarily concerned with truth, justice, and the preservation of individual rights. As noted earlier, the emotion of guilt is what keeps a person from behavior that goes against his/her own code of conduct as well as the cultureâs. Excessive guilt can, of course, be pathological. In contrast, in a typical shame culture (i.e., Arab/Islamic culture) what other people believe has a far more powerful impact on behavior than even what the individual believes. The desire to <b>preserve honor and avoid shame</b> to the exclusion of all else is one of the primary foundations of the culture. This desire has several side-effects, including granting the individual carte blanche to (1)engage in wrong-doing as long as no-one knows about it, or knows he is involved; and (2) <b>engage in any necessary behavior, including wrong-doing (i.e., murder, beheading, etc.) in order to avoid shame and/or recover honor.</b> Although it is hard for someone in a guilt culture to appreciate, it may be impossible for an individual in a shame culture to even admit to himself that he is guilty (even when he is)--particularly when everyone else considers him to be guilty-- because of the shame involved. As long as others remain convinced he is innocent, the individuals does not experience either guilt or shame. A great deal of effort therefore goes into making sure that others are convinced of your innocence, even if you are guilty.<b> Remember maintaining honor is what is important--not truth, not justice, and not tolerance or restraint.</b> One of the ways that those who fear shame protect their fragile self is to subjugate those who he perceives as weaker. By doing so, he can rationalize that he is superior to the subjugated individual. In fact, this is the only way he can maximize his honor. In Arab/Islamic culture, women are one of the primary instruments of achieving honor. Hence the bizarre and distorted attitude that the culture has toward women and the exaggerated means by which "honor" must be maintained. So strong is the cultural pressure, even women buy into the delusion. ... There is no shame involved in insulting or denigrating other cultures for Muslims. Therefore such insults are acceptable. That is why there is a disconnect between the disgusting cartoons that are incredibly offensive to Jews and Christians and/or the West (see here), yet at the same time, they angrily DEMAND on threat of violence that even the most mildly offensive cartoons (i.e., the Danish ones here) be immediately repudiated. <b>SHAME MUST BE AVOIDED AT ALL COSTS. Everything else is secondary. Contradictions are irrelevant; logic and reason unimportant. HONOR MUST BE RESTORED, and this can only be done at the expense of those who originated the "insult".</b>
Don't Confuse Hezbollah activities with the Palestinian Hamas activities. Recent Hezbollah activities are much more likely associated with the recent Sunni ( AL-Quaeda) attacks on Iraqi Shiites. This is meant to be some kind of distraction to cause something else. A message to the US possibly? We have mostly laid off the Shiites in Iraq because they were cooperating politically, BUT their response to recent Sunni attacks make draw them into the quagmire and the US may start hitting Shiites. Iran (who pulls hezbollah strings) may want us to know that even if they are not going to intervene in Iraq, they are not going to sit by idly as Shiites are hit inside Iraq. All widening of the same war.
Makes sense. I fully comprehend it logically. It's just hard to get one's mind around it: the spectacle of a culture so completely jacked up that logic, reason and human life itself have nil intrinsic value, crushed beneath the weight of an emotional imperative that doesn't even make sense. What's ironic is that, for all the moral aspects of militant Islam, the pride-above-all aspect of the culture sounds like a practical working recipe for nihilism. Doc Yakub himself could hardly invent a more effective psychological method for inducing mass indulgence in self-destructive, animal-like behavior.
There is a big payoff psychologically in demonizing an enemy. First it places the person demonizing the enemy in a morally superior position. Since they are evil, and since I am pointing out their evil, that must make me good. Then by categorizing them as functioning from some "lower" psychological level, it allows one to also feel mentally superior. This allows the rationalization of killing them with little to no remorse, to hating all members of a group, having reduced them to savages or animals, not human beings....who might actually have a cause that they perceive is worth dying for. So few are able to stay with the law, the purity of the law itself, where there is no need to demonize, no need to feel morally superior, no need to feel psychologically superior...simply stay with enforcement of the law. Of course, if we look at the problem of one of law enforcement, it won't feed into and off of the primitive and base emotions that most people need to energize to rationalize the type of hatred and bigotry we see toward those who engage in criminal acts. How similar to "The only good Indian is a dead Indian" or those Indians are "savages" and "heathens" or "Those black folks are shifty and lazy and can't be trusted" etc, etc, etc.....
Actually there are no similarities whatsoever. If what was described is a cultural phenomenon, which it is, then race has absolutely nothing to do with it. If you or I were born into a self-destructive culture, and did not have the good fortune to escape from it, then we too would be products of that culture regardless of race. To comment on the self-destructive nature of a culture has nothing to do with matters of genetics or intelligence. In contrast, your example is focused on intrinsic assumptions of race, which have everything to do with matters of genetics and intelligence. Furthermore, it is fairly obvious that any culture that subordinates logic and reason to raw emotion will wind up with serious problems. Without an emphasis on rational thinking and thoughtful action there can be no consistent application of a reasonable social contract. Therefore, if RM's description of the Palestinian culture / mulsim mindset is accurate in a psychological sense, then it is not racist or superiority-driven in the least to note the horrible downstream effects of such a belief system. If you wish to debate RM's assessment, then you can do so with reasoning and concrete examples of why you think he is wrong. There's no need to engage in bombastic handwaving.